About

By promoting the university’s own distinguished humanities faculty, the Center helps to promote the humanities as essential to teaching, learning, and research. Through its Focus on the Humanities series, humanities faculty continue to prove, again and again, that they can draw a curious, engaged crowd of campus and community members together for stimulating discussions that cut through academic hierarchies, and across disciplinary boundaries.

Each year, the Center places Public Humanities Graduate Fellows in academic year staff positions at established cultural institutions in Madison where they have the opportunity to use their experience and expertise to develop new programs and expand existing ones. The Center’s Public Humanities Exchange program supports more than a dozen annual graduate and undergraduate community-engaged projects, convened outside the boundaries of academia, with partners as diverse as prisons, hospitals, community centers, and public schools. The annual Iwanter Prize offers a $2000 award to a graduating senior who has demonstrated outstanding and interdisciplinary humanities scholarship.

The Center’s annual First Book Workshop provides both scholarly and collegial support for junior faculty members revising their dissertations into that all-important “first book.” The inaugural 2010 First Book Workshop recipient Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen saw her book, American Nietzsche, reviewed favorably in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Nation, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. Of the First Book program, Ratner-Rosenhagen said: “As a junior faculty member, receiving an award to foster emerging scholarship at UW-Madison made me feel especially supported by my home institution.” The Center’s Borghesi-Mellon Workshops workshops enable faculty, staff, and students to work together outside of the classroom, in working groups focused on research and public-facing projects, centered on an interdisciplinary topic, broadly conceived, drawn from any period, field, or method of research in the humanities.

The Center sponsors world-renowned visiting scholars whose work is on the cutting edge of humanities research, providing a welcoming, intellectually fertile environment with many opportunities for small discussion groups, shared meals, and one-on-one conversations with faculty and students, as well as evening talks that are open to the public.

This state-wide initiative, begun in 2005, connects UW faculty with high school teachers through the reading of a classic world text over the course of an academic year. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Wu Cheng’en’s Journey to the West, and Rousseau’s Confessions are just a few of the great literary works taken up by the Great World Texts program. Faculty/teacher workshops throughout the year encourage interaction, and students attend an annual conference hosted on the UW-Madison campus.

Begun in 2005, The Public Humanities Exchange (HEX) program funds innovative public humanities projects that forge partnerships between community organizations and UW-Madison graduate and undergraduate students. HEX goes beyond volunteerism to offer both students and partners the chance to build mutually rewarding relationships that cultivate community. Each HEX project is a student-initiated partnership with a community organization that addresses an existing need in the Madison community and draws upon students’ research, interests, and expertise. The HEX program provides participating students training in community partnership, mentoring during project design and implementation, and professional development opportunities. Since 2005, HEX scholars have worked with over 125 community partners.

Our fellowship program provides advanced graduate students in the humanities with experience outside of academia. By placing fellows in partner organizations around Madison including museums, hospitals, non-profits, community centers, and emerging socially-engaged businesses, the program facilitates the reciprocal sharing of resources and expertise, and highlights the significance of the humanities both on and off campus. We aim not only to provide graduate students the opportunity to explore diverse career paths, but also to cultivate a practice of public humanities within their academic work.

Humanities Without Boundaries is the flagship public lecture series of the Center for the Humanities, drawing large and diverse crowds for talks throughout the year by artists, authors, poets, filmmakers, food writers, philosophers, theorists, historians, and more, whose work crosses boundaries, elevates discourse, stirs curiosity, and invites audiences to inquire, critique, imagine, and engage on a wide range of topics. We’ve hosted Tommy Orange, Sianne Ngai, Margaret Atwood, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Ato Quayson, and many more. Humanities Without Boundaries is made possible by the Brittingham Wisconsin Trust and the Anonymous Fund of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Our Focus on the Humanities: Distinguished Faculty Lecture showcases current research by faculty in the humanities at UW-Madison, and creates a forum for campus and community members to engage with cutting-edge ideas of historical, political, philosophical, religious, and literary importance.

Focus on the Humanities lectures are presented in collaboration with the Institute for Research in the Humanities, and funded through the generous support of the Anonymous Fund of the College of Letters & Science.

Humanities NOW panels are convened to offer thoughtful perspectives from UW humanities faculty on breaking issues of our times. Our discussions offer a rare opportunity for community members and faculty to sift and winnow together, in the time-honored tradition of the University of Wisconsin, offering deeper insights and perspectives not found in general media coverage of disturbing, urgent events.

The McKay Lecture in the Humanities was established in honor of Nellie Y. McKay (1930-2006), Evjue Professor of American and African-American Literature at UW-Madison and pioneer in the field of African-American studies. The series is co-sponsored by the Institute for Research in the Humanities.

“Bí a bá perí akọni, a ó fida lalẹ”! When the soul of the beloved is addressed, it is right that the gestures be proper.

This annual lecture was established in honor of Tẹjumọla Ọlaniyan (1959-2019), Louise Durham Mead Professor of English and African Cultural Studies, and the Wole Soyinka Professor of the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In a career that spanned over three decades, Professor Ọlaniyan pursued a unique, capacious, and generous vision of humanistic scholarship in the field of African literary and cultural studies, including the black world as a whole and extending beyond it. “My deep interest,” he once asserted with characteristic precision, “is transdisciplinary teaching and research. My goal is the cultivation of critical self-reflexivity about our expressions and their many contexts.” This series is co-sponsored by the Department of English.

In addition to our main lecture series, we host and co-sponsor several special events yearly, including partnerships and collaborations with the Wisconsin Book Festival, Wisconsin Film Festival, and Havens-Wright Center for Social Justice, in addition to granting support to departments, centers, institutes, and student groups on campus so that they can bring top public intellectuals to engage with campus and the community.