News and Events
Kristin Bright Awarded Seed Grant for Feminist Health Futures Project
Axinn Center for the Humanities affiliated faculty member Kristin Bright and her colleagues Jacquelyne Luce at Mount Holyoke College and Sarah Willen at the University of Connecticut have been awarded a $5,000 seed grant from the New England Humanities Consortium for their project, “Feminist Health Futures: Enacting Collaborative Pedagogies in Health Humanities.” The grant will support a series of monthly dialogues about emerging models of collaborative undergraduate research and public scholarship in the health humanities and a culminating workshop at Middlebury College in spring 2024.
Past Events
The Middlebury College Department of Music, Axinn Center for the Humanities, and MiddData present
TWO PRESENTATIONS BY Jennifer Fraser, Ph.D.
Professor of Ethnomusicology and Anthropology, Conservatory of Music at Oberlin College
Learning to Work for Communities through Community-Engaged Projects and the Digital Humanities
In this lecture, Dr. Jennifer Fraser will trace the reinvention of her pedagogical and scholarly praxis in recent years as she has become committed to the design of scholarly projects that are responsive to community needs and desires, to public-facing scholarship, and high-impact pedagogies involving community-based learning and digital humanities project.
Tuesday, October 18, 2022 • 4:30 PM
Mahaney Arts Center, Room 125
Practicum in Digital Humanities
In this workshop, Dr. Fraser will share her experience of designing and implementing a large-scale Digital Humanities (DH) project, Song in the Sumatran Highlands, using the digital platform, Scalar, along with presenting an argument for ways in which DH might be evaluated and celebrated both within academic processes of tenure and promotion and within relevant scholarly societies.
Tuesday, October 18, 2022 • 5:30 PM
Mahaney Arts Center, Room 125
Free and open to public.
Public Writing Workshops
with Christopher Schaberg
The Axinn Center for the Humanities invites you to two exciting Public Writing Workshops in early May by Christopher Schaberg, Dorothy Harrell Brown Distinguished Professor of English at Loyola University New Orleans. The workshops will be held via Zoom. The first is open widely to any faculty interested in incorporating public-facing writing within their teaching. The second targets faculty looking to turn their scholarship into public-facing pieces (op-eds, etc.). Please register early, especially for the second workshop where space will be limited.
Writing for Public Audiences, with Students
Monday, May 2, 2022 • 4:30-5:30pm on Zoom
Register by May 2 at 10am: Workshop 1
In this hour-long session, Christopher Schaberg will share some of his experiences with studentsfocusing on collaborative public-facing writing, and getting this sort of work published. Schabergwill offer insights and guidance for instructors who want to experiment with this type of work,including styles the writing can take and outlets where such pieces can be pitched.
Public-Facing Writing for Humanities Scholars: A Workshop with Strategies, Tactics, & Tips
Friday, May 6, 2022 • 1:00-5:00pm on Zoom
Register by May 2 at 12pm: Workshop 2
During this workshop Christopher Schaberg will invite Humanities scholars to consider thepotentials, risks, and rewards of adjusting their writing so as to reach wide audiences across andbeyond academic readers. Topics will include the art of the pitch; etiquette for working witheditors; the media ecosystem of public-facing venues; and ways to explain and contextualize thissort of work for academic colleagues and administrators. Participants will draft pitches, discuss thestructures and forms of public-facing writing, and identify suitable venues for submission.
Translating Humanities Research into Public Writing
with Dr. Jennifer Wilson
Friday, January 21, 2022 • 1:00-3:00pm on Zoom
Artists in Dialogue: Jon Henry & Mikael Owunna, Moderated by Andrew Plumley ‘11
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 17, 2021
7 p.m. EST
Photographers Jon Henry and Mikael Owunna discuss their artistic responses to police murder of Black men. Andrew Plumley ’11 (Senior Director, Equity & Culture, American Alliance of Museums) moderates this online conversation, which will include audience Q&A. Free.
Advance registration required.
American Sign Language interpretation and live closed captioning provided. Accessibility questions? Contact Mikki Lane, 802.443.2309 or mlane@middlebury.edu.
This event is organized in conjunction with the exhibition “Art & Protest: Artists as Agents of Social Change,” on view at the Middlebury College Museum of Art through December 12.
Co-sponsored by American Studies Department; Anderson Freeman Resource Center; Anti-Racist Task Force; Axinn Center for the Humanities; Black Studies Program; Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity; Critical Conversations Series; Faculty Director of Equity, Justice, and Inclusion; First Year Seminar Program; History of Art & Architecture Department; Justice Projects; Office of Institutional Diversity, Equity and Inclusion; The Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs Program on Global Anti-Racism; and Studio Art Department.
Image credits:
Left: Mikael Owunna, “Nommo Semi (The Guardian of Space),” 2018 from the series “Infinite Essence.” Dye-sublimated aluminum Chromaluxe metal. Collection of Middlebury College Museum of Art. Purchase with funds provided by the Henry J. Simonds Student Curator Fund, 2021. Copyright Mikael Owunna.
Right: Jon Henry, “Untitled #48, Inglewood, CA,” 2019 from the series “Stranger Fruit.” Digital print on paper. Collection of Middlebury College Museum of Art. Purchase with funds provided by the Foster Family Art Acquisition Fund, 2020.007.08. Copyright Jon Henry.
- Sponsored by:
- Museum of Art; Office of Institutional Diversity Equity & Inclusion; Studio Art; Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs; First Year Seminar; History of Arts and Architecture; American Studies; Center Comparative Study of Race & Ethnicity; Anderson Freeman Resource Center; Black Studies, Axinn Center of the Humanities
‘An Issue of Mercy’: Exploring the Life of Phillis Wheatley Peters
Through Documents & Poetry
Webinar with Prof. Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
Thursday, November 4, 2021, 7pm
In this online lecture, poet, essayist, and novelist Honorée Fanonne Jeffers will discuss the research and practice that led to her latest book of poetry, The Age of Phillis (2020). This collection is based upon fifteen years of research on the life and times of Phillis Wheatley Peters (1753–84), a formerly enslaved person who was the first African American woman to publish a book. The Age of Phillis won the 2021 NAACP Image Award for Literary Work: Poetry, was long-listed for the 2020 National Book Award in Poetry, and was a finalist for both the 2021 PEN/Volcker Award and the 2021 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry.
For over twenty years, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers has been lifting her voice on issues of Black culture, racism, American history, and gender through the medium of writing. She is the author of five collections of poetry and the recent novel The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois (2021). She is the recipient of fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, the Witter Bynner Foundation through the Library of Congress, and the Tennessee Williams’ Scholarship in Fiction from the Sewanee Writers Conference; in 2018, she was honored with the Harper Lee Award for Literary Distinction, a lifetime achievement award. She is a Professor of English at the University of Oklahoma.
Sponsored by the Academic Enrichment Fund, American Studies Department, English and American Literature Department, Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity, Black Studies Department, Gender/Sexuality/Feminist Studies Department, Writing Program, History Department, and the Axinn Center for the Humanities
Charles S. Grant Memorial Lecture: “Does American Politics have a Future? A Reflection on Time and Democracy.”
May 6, 2021
3:00–4:15 PM ET
One of the most influential historians of our times, Timothy Snyder, the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, will deliver this year’s Charles S. Grant Memorial Lecture. The topic of his lecture is “Does American Politics have a Future? A Reflection on Time and Democracy.”
The Grant lectureship is named in honor of Charles S. Grant, who was a gifted teacher and leading scholar of early American history in Middlebury’s History Department prior to his untimely death in 1961. Shortly thereafter, his college colleagues and friends in the community raised funds to establish a lectureship in his honor. Over the past fifty years, the Grant Fund has brought many distinguished historians to Middlebury.
- Sponsored by:
- History
Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals
A talk by Alexis Gumbs, independent Poet, scholar, and activist
Gensler Family Symposium: April 30th, at 4:30 PM
For more information: go/gensler2021
Architectures of the Flesh
With guest speaker Zakiyyah Iman Jackson
March 31, 2021, 4:30 p.m
Zakiyyah Iman Jackson is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World, published by NYU Press in 2020 as part of their Sexual Cultures series. She is at work on a second book, tentatively entitled Obscure Light: Blackness and the Derangement of Sex-Gender. She has published numerous articles in Gay and Lesbian Quarterly, Feminist Studies, South Atlantic Quarterly, and others.
Cosponsors: Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies, The Feminist Resource Center at Chellis House, Black Studies, Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity, Department of English and American Literatures
“The History of White People and What It Means for Now”
with Nell Irvin Painter
Friday, October 9, 2020, 4:30–6:30 p.m. via Zoom
Sponsored by the Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies; Feminist Resource Center at Chellis House; Axinn Center for the Humanities; Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity; Black Studies Program; Privilege & Poverty Academic Cluster; and the President’s Office.
“Black Is the Body: Writing about Race in America”
with Emily Bernard
March 5, 2020, at 4:30 p.m.
Racial identity is a construction. But just because it is a fiction does not make it untrue. In this talk, Emily Bernard discussed the complex and central role of storytelling as a source of power, meaning, and beauty in her life as a writer, reader, and scholar of African American experience.
Emily Bernard is the Julian Lindsay Green and Gold Professor of English at the University of Vermont. In addition to Black Is the Body: Stories from My Grandmother’s Time, My Mother’s Time, and Mine, her books include Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, Some of My Best Friends: Writings on Interracial Friendships, and Michelle Obama: The First Lady in Photographs.
View a video recording of the event.