Whitney Humanities Center

**About the Whitney Humanities Center** The Whitney Humanities Center is more than a place. It's a center of gravity for the many orbits of research and teaching, creative expression, and scholarly exchange that make up the humanities at Yale University. **Our Vision** The humanities ask questions that no single discipline can answer alone. How do we make sense of the worlds we inherit? How do we understand what others have created and believed across time and place? How do we account for the forces-historical, social, political-that shape what we know and how we know it? The Whitney Humanities Center exists to advance that work. Envisioned by Yale President A. Bartlett Giamatti as "a gathering place for overlapping excellences," it has long championed the "radically human work of making with the mind." The WHC honors the depth of individual disciplines while creating the conditions for them to meet. It is where a historian of Ming China finds unexpected common ground with a scholar of the Ottoman Empire, where a student of the Black Arts movement illuminates something new about classical poetry, where the tools of one field transform the questions of another. Under the leadership of Director Cajetan Iheka, that vision has taken on an increasingly global dimension, connecting the humanities at Yale to scholarly traditions and communities around the world. **Our Work** We occupy a unique position at Yale: independent of any single department and free from curricular obligations, we exist to support the full range of humanistic inquiry in whatever form that takes. Our programs span a weekly fellows forum, working groups, film screenings and lecture series, conferences and symposia, residential and graduate-student fellowships, research and publication support, and visits from leading scholars, artists, and public intellectuals. What unites our community-Yale faculty, students, librarians and archivists, editors and curators, visiting scholars and artists, and New Haven neighbors-is the conviction that this work matters.