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

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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Jane Taylor

IHGC Fall 2019 Distinguished Visitor 
October 4, 2019 | 4:00 pm - 5:30 pm | Bryan Hall Faculty Lounge
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Achille Mbembe

Achille Mbembe Lecture

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

WATCH THE LECTURE

Ghosh

Amitav Ghosh

IHGC Writer-in-residence
Watch his lectures

Burning the Library of Life: Species Extinction and the Humanities

A Symposium | September 26-27, 2019
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Global Map

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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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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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

News & Announcements

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.

 
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.
Fri Mar 20
10:30 am - 12:00 pm | Wilson Hall 142
Mellon Fellows Seminar - Fotini Kondyli, "Citizen Participation and Urban Planning in Byzantine Athens"

Mellon Fellows Seminar - Fotini Kondyli, "Citizen Participation and Urban Planning in Byzantine Athens"

Fri Mar 20


Fotini Kondyli (Assistant Professor of Byzantine Art and Archaeology) is a Byzantine archaeologist who works on the Late Antique, Byzantine and Frankish periods. Her research interests include the construction of Byzantine spaces, communal identity, landscape and household archaeology and the archaeology of Byzantine non-elites. She also works on cultural, economic and political networks in the Eastern Mediterranean in the Late Byzantine period (13th- 15th c.). She is presently writing her first monograph on aspects of vulnerability and resilience of Late Byzantine rural societies, focusing on the spatial organization and socio-economic strategies of non-elite groups in response to economic and demographic crises. Her work brings together archaeology, archival research, spatial analysis, and the digital humanities.
 
Fri Apr 17
10:30 am - 12:00 pm | Wilson Hall 142
Mellon Fellows Seminar - Giulia Paoletti, "Decentralizing the Gaze: On the Origins of Photography in Senegal (1860-1910s)

Mellon Fellows Seminar - Giulia Paoletti, "Decentralizing the Gaze: On the Origins of Photography in Senegal (1860-1910s)

Fri Apr 17


Giulia Paoletti’s research examines nineteenth and twentieth century African art with a particular focus on the early histories of photography in West Africa. Based on two years of fieldwork, she is working on a book manuscript tracing the origins and early developments of photography in Senegal (1860-1960). The book is based on her dissertation that received the Arts Council of the African Studies Association’s 2017 Roy Sieber Award for Best Dissertation in African art (2013- 6). Besides Senegal, she did research in Mali, Nigeria, Benin, Cameroon and the Gambia where she has examined contemporary art practices.

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...