Current Humanities Projects
Learn more about the projects that were selected this year and the exciting line-up of speakers, films, symposia, courses, conferences, panels and exhibitions.
An Invitation to the Worldview of Hayao Miyazaki and Spirited Away (2001): A Zoom interview with voice actor Yoomi Tamai
Shizuka Hardy
February 19, 2024
The Modern Languages and Cultures Department’s Japanese Program presents an authentic language learning and cultural experience for UR students featuring an interview and discussion with Tokyo-based professional voice actor Yoomi Tamai. After Tamai graduated from anime director Hayao Miyazaki’s animation director training program, Miyazaki recruited her as the voice of the character Rin in his Academy award-winning film Spirited Away (2001). In this event, Ms. Tamai will talk about her experience as a voice actor for the role, backstory, and what Miyazaki wants to convey to his audience through his movies including his recently acclaimed The Boy and the Heron (2023). The talk will be in Japanese, but faculty in MLC’s Japanese program will be on hand to simultaneously translate the lecture and discussion.
Diaphany: Reflections in/on Glass
Michael Anderson
March 7, 2024
A program of chamber and choral music accompanying the Memorial Art Gallery’s new exhibit on stained glass. Prof. Michael Alan Anderson (Eastman School of Music) directs Chicago-based early music vocal ensemble Schola Antiqua in works resonating with the wide range of themes in the sixteenth-century glass. Eastman students from the instrumental group OSSIA New Music will interweave movements from Philip Glass’s Glassworks. Organist Naomi Gregory will contribute from the gallery’s Italian Baroque Organ.
Unknown German Workshop
Wild Man with the Arms of the Holzhausen Family, 1599
Glass with silver stain, vitreous paint, and lead
Bertha Buswell Bequest, 1942.28.2
The Climate of Critical Theory: Economies and Ecologies Today
Jonathon Catlin
March 29, 2024
2023 marked the centennial of the founding of the Institute for Social Research, also known as the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. This interdisciplinary day-long symposium will bring together scholars working across different traditions of critical theory, broadly conceived, to discuss topics ranging from the future of work to the politics of climate catastrophe.
For a complete schedule of events, click here.
Indigenous Earth-Sky Eclipse Festival
Brianna Theobald
Spring 2024
In anticipation of the total solar eclipse, this all-day event features scientists, knowledge keepers, artists, and educators from Indigenous nations in the United States and Canada. The day’s activities include lectures, storytelling, and demonstrations, all of which combine and link STEM knowledges with what the Dakota astronomer James Rock calls CLAH: culture, language, arts, and humanities.
Jean-Pierre Bekolo
Julie Papaioannou
April 9-10, 2024
April 9: Renowned Cameroonian filmmaker Jean-Pierre Bekolo will hold a Q&A session after the screening of his film Nous les Noirs (2021). The film is a fictional documentary about the discovery and history of Colombia’s black people. It explores cultural identity forged around the idea of resistance against slavery and colonialism.
April 10: A talk and discussion with film director, Jean-Pierre Bekolo on The Future is Now: Cinema as a Transformative Tool. An ardent proponent of the promotion of cinema as a powerful medium for the decolonization of the image in the African continent and the world, Jean-Pierre Bekolo has created a profoundly reflexive cinema and transformed film genres in a powerful combination of political overtones, comic elements, and social commentary. Bekolo developed an original aesthetic approach of eclectic visual explorations that creatively challenged stereotypical representations of artistic and cinematic productions in Africa. His first film Quartier Mozart (1992) gained him immediate international recognition, along with Aristotle’s Plot (1995), Les Saignantes (2005), the first sci-fi film in Africa, Naked Reality (2016), an experimental Afrofuturistic/sci-fi film, and documentaries such as Les Choses et les Mots de Mudimbe (2015) and Nous les Noirs (We, Black People, 2021). This year, Jean-Pierre Bekolo has been named the 2024 MacMillan-Stewart Fellow at Harvard University.
The CNY Humanities Corridor Working Group on Early Modern Hispanic Studies presents its 3rd Annual Symposium
Ryan Prendergast
April 13, 2024
Faculty and graduate students from the group will present their work on a variety of topics. There will be a keynote address entitled "The Space of Memory" given by Professor Marina S. Brownlee, Robert Schirmer Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature, Princeton University
Co-sponsors: Central New York Humanities Corridor, the Department of History, and the Department of Modern Languages and Culture
Confluences: A Scholarly Celebration of the work of Janet Berlo
Allen Topolski
April 19, 2024
This project will introduce an accompanying digital festschrift centered on indigeneity and include scholars and artists in conversations around the expanse of research and curation generously Berlo has brought to the field.
What Species Is Multispecies Justice?
Richard Fadok
May 9, 2024
Cary Wolfe, a leading scholar of posthumanism, will open the Badgering Architecture symposium with a public keynote on multispecies justice. His talk will consider two of our most prominent political models of justice for other species—“animal rights” and “rights of Nature”—and trace their implications for the nexus of life, law, and ethics.
Wolfe is currently the Bruce and Elizabeth Dunlevie Professor of English at Rice University. He has published widely in animal studies and the environmental humanities, including monographs (Art and Posthumanism; Ecological Poetics, or, Wallace Stevens’ Birds; Before the Law; What Is Posthumanism? Animal Rites; Critical Environments; and The Limits of American Literary Ideology in Pound and Emerson), multi-authored collections (The Death of the Animal, Manifestly Haraway, Philosophy and Animal Life), edited volumes (Zoontologies, Observing Complexity; and The Other Emerson), and nearly 100 articles and chapters. Wolfe is the founding editor of the Posthumanities book series with the University of Minnesota Press as well as the founding director of the Center for Critical and Cultural Theory at Rice University.
Click here to view event poster.
42nd Annual International Conference of the Society for Interdisciplinary French Seventeenth-Century Studies
Anna Rosensweig
Fall 2023
The Society for Interdisciplinary French Seventeenth-Century Studies (SE17) will hold its 42nd annual international conference at the University of Rochester from October 19-21, 2023. Scholars from around the world will present their work and discuss the current state of early modern French studies, broadly conceived. Since its first meeting in 1981, SE17 has been a vibrant space of intellectual exchange. The society is committed to a non-hierarchical organizational structure and mentoring junior scholars. Resolutely interdisciplinary, SE17 invites participation from those working in a wide range of fields and approaches including art history, history, Black studies, cultural studies, Indigenous studies, gender, sexuality and women’s studies, literature, philosophy, religion, and theater and performance studies. What unites these diverse approaches is a shared commitment to working beyond the frames of a French national tradition in order to situate early modern France within its many global contexts.