This year marks the 35th anniversary of the founding of the Stanford Humanities Center. While much has changed since 1980, the core mission of the Center remains unaltered: to cultivate an environment for leading scholars to explore the fundamental questions of the human experience, and to ensure that the humanities continue to thrive for the benefit of all.
In 2015-16, the Center will host approximately fifty scholars through residencies of various lengths. This fall we are welcoming our new class of year-long
Stanford Humanities Center Fellows, who are working on projects ranging from human-animal relations in Neolithic Turkey to modern musicians from the Horn of Africa. We will also welcome a group of
International Visitors, who will each be at the Center for month-long residencies and offer a variety of lectures and seminars to inspire new collaborations at Stanford. The
Hume Humanities Honors Fellowship bring us eight seniors from across Stanford’s humanities departments, each of them writing a thesis guided by a faculty advisor and enhanced by their new scholarly community at the Center. Finally, we welcome the new and returning
Mellon Postdoctoral Fellows, who are based in Stanford’s academic departments but join in the daily life of the Center’s intellectual community.
As the center of the humanities on the Stanford campus, the Humanities Center strives to ensure that Stanford remains at the forefront of humanities innovation. Each year, it brings together scholars, students, and the general public for meaningful dialogues about the human experience. On October 29, the
Presidential Lecture will be delivered by Marilynne Robinson, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Humanities Medal; this event is free and open to the public. We also launched a new collaboration with the
Cantor Arts Center that invites our fellows to give gallery talks on current art exhibitions. We continue to deepen and enrich our connections with the
Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA), the digital humanities laboratory at Stanford, and our fellows receive expert guidance on how to create new tools to interpret the cultural record of past and present.
If you would like to join our mailing list to receive information about forthcoming events we sponsor, as well as our monthly e-newsletter describing humanities research taking place across campus, please click
here.
Best wishes to all for a successful 2015-16!
Caroline Winterer
Director Stanford Humanities Center
Anthony P. Meier Family Professor in the Humanities
