Olivia DrakeFifty years ago, political theorist Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) published Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, a work she completed while she was a Fellow at Wesleyan’s Center for Advanced Studies (now the Center for the Humanities). On Sept. 26-28, Wesleyan will host a conference to honor this achievement and reflect on the reverberating repercussions of Arendt's work, a trial report that asks important and abiding questions about personal responsibility under dictatorship, the moral judgment of evil, the juridical prosecution of genocidal crimes of an international nature, and, more broadly, the historical conditions that shape our understanding of the Holocaust. The…
Benjamin TraversEthan Kleinberg, director of the Center for the Humanities, professor of letters, professor of history, discusses the core mission of the Center and his vision for its future in this video: [youtube width="640" height="420"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_C6e9cR-m8[/youtube]
Bill HolderEthan Kleinberg, professor of history and letters, will serve as the next director of the Center for Humanities (CHUM), beginning July 1, 2012. Rob Rosenthal, provost, vice president for Academic Affairs, John E. Andrus Professor of Sociology, made the announcement in Novemeber. Kleinberg has served Wesleyan as director of the College of Letters and director of the Vassar-Wesleyan Program in Paris. He is currently associate editor of History & Theory and will be assuming the role of executive editor in the coming year. Kleinberg's wide-ranging scholarly work spans across the fields of history, philosophy, comparative literature and religion. His current research interests…
Wesleyan has received a $2 million challenge grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to help endow the Center for the Humanities. The grant requires Wesleyan to raise an additional $4 million in endowment funds over the next four years. “This grant is a welcome acknowledgement of the Center’s leadership role in keeping humanities scholarship at the center of the most interesting trends in American intellectual life,” said Wesleyan President Michael Roth. “Scores of Humanities Centers across the country have adopted the Wesleyan model, and I am deeply grateful to the Mellon Foundation for affirming the importance of this work.”…
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This fall, students have the opportunity to work towards one of four certificates, in addition to their degree. The new certificate programs include South Asian Studies; Middle Eastern Studies; Writing; and Social, Cultural and Critical Theory. “These are outstanding endeavors by the faculty to keep the curriculum fresh and innovative, and to help students study across the disciplines but with a road map for curricular coherence,” says Karen Anderson, associate provost. South Asian Studies Certificate Wesleyan already offers courses and resources for all students interested in studying the cultures of Bangladesh, (more…)
In the 1970s, veterans, activists and psychiatrists were hard at work getting the disorder that came to be called post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) included in the upcoming edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders III. During the same period, feminists were building a successful anti-rape movement that crucially insisted that rape is a form of violence. On Feb. 15, Sally Bachner, assistant professor of English, spoke on “Rape Trauma, Combat Trauma, and the Making of PTSD: Feminist Fiction in the 1970s" during the Center for the John E. Sawyer Spring Lecture Series on War. Bachner proposed that…