University of Virginia, College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

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Global South Initiative

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded the University of Virginia $3.47 million to launch a major
humanities initiative dedicated to the study of the Global South. The College and Graduate School of Arts &
Sciences has matched the grant, making the initial five-year investment to launch the initiative about $7 million.

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Jane Taylor

IHGC Fall 2019 Distinguished Visitor 
October 4, 2019 | 4:00 pm - 5:30 pm | Bryan Hall Faculty Lounge
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HistoREMIX  Humanities Week | Feburary 24 - 28, 2020 | Stay tuned for full schedule!

CHCI

Humanities Informatics

Consortium of Humanities Centers & Institutes 2018 Annual Meeting | June 13-17, 2018
A conference on Humanities Informatics that showcased the power of the humanities
to address the urgent questions about the ‘human’ in our information age.

WATCH CHCI 2018

Puzzle Poetry

Puzzle Poesis

UVa's Puzzle Poetry working group was launched in the fall of 2017 by Neal Curtis and
Brad Pasanek as an experimental and collaborative endeavor. The group seeks to treat
poems as puzzles, isolate the substance of prosody, and apprehend shape as a medium. 
They are makers, coders, and subformalists. 

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Asian Cosmopolitanisms

Asian Cosmopolitanisms

A new IHGC lab on Asian Cosmopolitanisms aiming to reconceptualize the study of Asia
across the disciplines of the humanities and interpretive social sciences.

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Ghosh

Amitav Ghosh

IHGC Writer-in-residence
Watch his lectures

Institute of the Humanities & Global Cultures (IHGC)

About

The Institute of the Humanities & Global Cultures (IHGC) offers a vision at
once local and global, and a mission both academic and socially engaged. 

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Burning the Library of Life: Species Extinction and the Humanities

A Symposium | September 26-27, 2019
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Achille Mbembe

Achille Mbembe Lecture

"Negative Messianism in the Age of Animism" | September 18, 2017

WATCH THE LECTURE

News & Announcements

Thu Jan 30
4:00 PM | The Dome Room, Rotunda
Joan Wallach Scott, "Accounting for History: The Movements for Reparations for Slavery in the U.S."

Joan Wallach Scott, "Accounting for History: The Movements for Reparations for Slavery in the U.S."

Thu Jan 30


Reviewing the long history of demands for reparations and looking closely at the current movements, Joan Scott will argue that although material compensation is certainly part of the effort, the demand for reparations is best understood as a critique of the conventional writing of American history.  It is an example of a critical politics that takes its aim at the way history represents the past.

 

Joan Scott is Professor Emerita in the School of Social Science in the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. Her groundbreaking work has challenged the foundations of conventional historical practice, including the nature of historical evidence and historical experience and the role of narrative in the writing of history. She is the author of numerous books that have been important for numerous disciplines and debates. These include Gender and the Politics of History (1988), Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (1996), Parité: Sexual Equality and the Crisis of French Universalism (2005), The Politics of the Veil (2007), The Fantasy of Feminist History (2011), Sex and Secularism (2017), and Knowledge, Power, and Academic Freedom (2018).

 

Prof. Scott’s visit is co-sponsored by the Institute for Humanities and Global Cultures, Political Theory: An International Journal of Political Philosophy, the Departments of Politics and of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, The Virginia Center for the Study of Religion, and the Power, Violence, and Inequality Collective.
Fri Feb 07
10:30 am - 12:00 pm | Wilson Hall 142
Mellon Fellows Seminar - Katelyn Wood, "Listening Backwards: Archiving Laughter and Queer Sonic Intimacies"

Mellon Fellows Seminar - Katelyn Wood, "Listening Backwards: Archiving Laughter and Queer Sonic Intimacies"

Fri Feb 07


Katelyn Hale Wood is a performance studies scholar and theatre historian whose research engages the intersections of critical race and queer theory, gender studies, and 20th/21st century comedic performance. Her first book project, tentatively titled Modalities of Freedom: Black Feminist Comedic Performance in 20th and 21st Century USA, argues how the work of Black feminist stand-up comedians have played vital roles in queer, feminist, and anti-racist community building. Her work has been published in Theatre Topics, QED: A Journal in GLTBQ Worldmaking, and Departures in Critical Qualitative Research, and has also been supported by the American Society for Theatre Research and the National Center for Institutional Diversity. 

Wood received her Ph.D. in Theatre History and Criticism with an emphasis in African American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin (2014). Prior to joining the faculty at UVA, she taught in the Theatre History and Theory program at Miami University. Alongside her scholarship, Wood is also a dramaturge. 

At UVA, Wood teaches courses in theatre history, performance theory, as well as interdisciplinary topics, such as race and performance in the Americas, queer and feminist performance in the U.S., and comedy as protest.

 
Fri Feb 07
3:00 - 5:00 pm. | Wilson Hall 142
Information Session for 2020 Summer School of the Academy of Global Humanities and Critical Theory at the University of Bologna

Information Session for 2020 Summer School of the Academy of Global Humanities and Critical Theory at the University of Bologna

Fri Feb 07


Academy of Global Humanities and Critical Theory at the University of Bologna

June 22 through July 3

A&S will fund program fees, airfare, lodging, and living expenses for a limited number of PhD students who are admitted to the 2020 Summer School of the Academy of Global Humanities and Critical Theory at the University of Bologna.  This year’s topic is Theory, Technology and the Political Imagination. Information for applicants is available at http://aghct.org/how-to-apply.  Applications must be submitted online by March 15th, 2020.  Applicants should indicate in their statements of purpose that they are applying for an institutional grant from the University of Virginia.  Applicants will be notified of selection results by April 6th

There is an information session on Feb. 7th in Wilson Hall 142 for students who wish to learn more about how to participate in this unique opportunity for intellectual and professional development.
Mon Feb 24
Humanities Week 2020

Humanities Week 2020

Mon Feb 24


HistoryREMIX is the theme of this year's Humanities Week, and undergraduate-led series of events sponsored by the IHGC. Stay tuned for a full schedule.
Thu Feb 27
TBD | Wilson Hall 142
Caroline Elkins, "Violence and the History of Empire" (convened by Erik Linstrum)

Caroline Elkins, "Violence and the History of Empire" (convened by Erik Linstrum)

Thu Feb 27

More Events

Mellon Global South Initiative

Mellon Global South Initiative

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded the University of Virginia $3.47 million to launch a major humanities initiative dedicated to the study of the Global South. The College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences will match the grant, making the initial five-year investment to launch the initiative about $7 million.

Learn More

Clay Endowments & Grants

Clay Endowments & Grants

The Institute of the Humanities and Global Cultures (IHGC) invites proposals for funding from the Buckner W. Clay Endowment to support innovative work in the global humanities at the University of Virginia. The Endowment provides an ambitious basis of support for faculty and student research and teaching to be conducted under the auspices of the IHGC. Faculty and students from across all schools and disciplines at the university are welcome and encouraged to apply. 

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Bologna

Summer School in Global Studies and Critical Theory

The Academy of Global Humanities and Critical Theory is a new research entity jointly promoted by the University of Virginia, Duke University and the University of Bologna. It is conceived as an intellectual space for scholars coming from different research fields and geographical regions to work together on the redefinition of the humanities in a global age.

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Njelle Hamilton, "Caribbean Chronotropes: The Politics, Physics, and Poetics of Time in Contemporary Fiction"

Project Summary: “Caribbean Chronotropes” is a book-length investigation of the depiction of time technologies and time travel in speculative Caribbean novels written between 2008 and 2018. Its central concern is the ways in which Caribbean writers have grappled with concepts from theoretical physics to conceptualize a regional temporality that is out of sync with linear time, and to...

Fotini Kondyli, "Citizen Participation and Urban Planning in Byzantine Athens"

Project Summary: My project on Byzantine urbanism and Athens in particular, seeks to reconstruct the topography and spatial layout of Byzantine Athens (4th-15th c AD), and better understand contemporary living conditions and socio-economic activities in the city. Emphasis is placed on city-making processes and particularly the role of non-elite, ordinary people in them. Similar to...

Giulia Paoletti, "Reinventing Photography: Technology and Visuality in Senegal (1860-1960)"

Project Summary: My current book project reframes narratives of photography’s origin and originality by zooming into the first one hundred years of photography in Senegal (1860-1960). Senegal has received significant attention as one of the epicenters of modernism in the Black Atlantic, and yet, the advent of photography in the country in the 1840s has hardly been considered in...

Ahmed H. al-Rahim, "Mobility and Knowledge in the Mongol Empire"

Project Summary:  This project investigates patterns of migration, transmission of knowledge, and interreligious history after the Mongol conquests of the Middle East and East Asia in the late Middle Ages (1206-1405 A.D.). This Mellon Humanities Fellowship funds research into the history of Islamic learning under the aegis of the Mongol Empire and, specifically, the founding of “...

Erik Linstrum, "Age of Emergency: Living with Violence at the End of Empire"

Project Summary:  How did British society respond — or fail to respond — to the use of torture, summary executions, and other atrocities in its overseas empire after 1945?  Although the absence of sustained outrage at the time has often been attributed to the absence of information, awareness of brutal violence was in fact widespread.  Many different communities or “circles of knowing...

Katelyn Wood, "Cracking Up: Black Feminist Stand-Up Comedy in 20th and 21st Century USA"

Project Summary:  Cracking Up archives and analyzes how Black feminist comedians assert freedom and citizenship in the United States through joke-telling. I argue that Black feminist comedic performance and the laughter it ignites are vital components of feminist, queer, and anti-racist protest. Through archival research and performance analysis, I study Black women stand-up...