Zoe Berg, Photo Editor

Before the pandemic, many students knew the Whitney Humanities Center for its film screenings and public lectures. But now, following its move to central campus, the Center hopes to become a broader hub for the humanities at Yale.

For the first four decades after its founding in 1981, the WHC was located on Wall Street, in the former Trinity Parish Church House, acquired by Yale in 1980 as a gift from John Hay Whitney, class of 1926. The Center is a fundamentally interdisciplinary institution that brings together people from across the University to promote dialogue and engagement in the humanities. It hosts events that bring prominent visitors to Yale, provides research and publication grants, holds academic workshops and sponsors working groups for graduate students and faculty members. Though the Center has encountered difficulties carrying out normal activities during the pandemic, it is planning to return to in-person operations starting April 1. The WHC leadership plans to use the Center’s new location in the Humanities Quadrangle to increase its scope and impact.

“It’s been a time of massive change as we’ve moved into our new location at 320 York St.,” WHC Associate Communications Officer Megan O’Donnell told the News. “It’s a shift toward a greater focus on Yale faculty and students — undergraduates and graduates. While we’re still very much public-facing outside of Yale, we’re doing a lot of work to re-center faculty, students and the broader Yale community. Being in HQ is phenomenal for that because we’re really at the center of a lot of the humanities at Yale right now. It’s really like a hub and a gathering space.”

The Center moved into HQ at the start of the 2021-22 academic year, joining 14 other departments and programs in the humanities, including Comparative Literature, Judaic Studies, French and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. Some humanities departments, like English, Philosophy and Classics — all located on Old Campus — remain geographically independent.

The Center’s own wing of the Humanities Quadrangle lies near the building’s entrance on York Street — an intentional decision, according to Chair of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations Shawkat Toorawa. 

“That is an immediate statement about the centrality of the Whitney Humanities Center to the way that Yale is organizing the humanities,” Toorawa said. “If you walk down the hallway and turn left when you enter HQ, you’ll see posters on the walls of what the Center has done historically. It’s basically a ‘who’s who’ of authors and thinkers, cultural theorists and performance artists. If you think of the humanities in the way that we think of Lincoln Center for music, this is the center for humanities.” 

Soon after Toorawa came to Yale, he became a fellow at the WHC. The WHC fellowship is a cornerstone of the Center’s intellectual mission, forming a broad-based community of humanists who hail from nearly every part of the University. WHC Fellows are appointed by the University President at the recommendation of the WHC and its Executive Committee. The group of fellows includes “members of Yale’s teaching community from all ranks and disciplines.” The fellows gather for weekly luncheons at the Center, where faculty present and discuss their work.

WHC Director and French professor Alice Kaplan said that, for many fellows, presenting work at weekly luncheons is their “first time giving a talk to their peers at Yale.” 

“Faculty are often asked to go speak at other places,” Kaplan told the News. “But, within the University, faculty don’t talk to each other about their work very much.”

The fellowship program is designed to fill this gap by fostering dialogue about the humanities among Yale faculty members. Kaplan told the News that she loves helping choose each new cohort of WHC fellows because it is an opportunity to foster “cross-fertilization” in the humanities by “attending to diversity of every kind — department, background, everything.”

Though this year’s luncheons have been on Zoom since October, Ardis Butterfield, English professor and current WHC fellow, said that attending the weekly luncheons has been her favorite part of the program. 

“There are fellows from all areas of the humanities, and a condition of [becoming a fellow] is that everyone has to give their own talk at least once,” Butterfield said. “It’s great to get to hear about other people’s work. We’re all at Yale, and we’re all colleagues, but we have very different specialties. It’s rare to hear what others are working on outside of the fields we’re in.”

Priyamvada Natarajan, professor of astronomy and physics and director of the Franke Program in Science and the Humanities at WHC, agreed with Butterfield and Kaplan about the need for greater interaction among faculty at Yale. 

“All these interdisciplinary programs are designed to break intellectual silos and get people to interact,” Natarajan said. “The pandemic has posed real challenges. Our job is to convene, to provide a space — both physically and intellectually. This is a process that involves mingling, interacting. COVID has hindered that.”

Kaplan told the News that one of her immediate ambitions is to get a “coffee cart” set up in HQ. She hopes that a change like this will “push people to ‘live together.’” 

Like Natarajan, Kaplan sees the Center as a place to promote casual and intimate interactions among faculty members who otherwise might not interact as much as they should.

“Geography really matters in fostering interdisciplinary collaborations,” Natarajan said. “I think it’s a real asset for the humanities to be geographically co-located [in HQ]. There are these unplanned conversations you have in shared space that spark new conversations and ideas. We are really looking forward to that.”

Importantly, though the Center aims to bring together the humanities within the University, it is also closely connected to the humanities outside of Yale. 

“As Chair of [Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations], I don’t have conversations with departments outside of Yale,” Toorawa said. “I have conversations with other departments at Yale. But directors of humanities centers around the world … discuss what they’re doing and the challenges they’re facing. So they all learn from each other. So that means there’s a cross-cutting community of humanists around the country and the world. And that’s unusual, because that’s not something that’s necessarily true of other units at the University.”

In many ways, the Center serves as an outward-facing institution for the humanities at Yale, O’Donnell told the News. Because of its broad reach both within and beyond the University, the Center’s leadership sees the WHC as more than just a physical space or a wing of HQ.

“I think of the Whitney Humanities Center as a ‘node,’” Toorawa said. “It’s not so much a ‘building’ because humanists are everywhere. The Center creates the possibility of having a node, a place where humanists can convene and share ideas, but it’s not possible to say what that will look like yet.”

The Center’s new location in HQ also served to expand its physical resources; it now has three different studios for film screenings, instead of only one. This Thursday evening, the Center will host its first film screening since the start of the pandemic, “Two English Girls” (1971) on 35mm. Kaplan and WHC Associate Director Diane Berrett Brown emphasized that the event represents important progress toward the kinds of in-person activities the Center relies on to promote the humanities at Yale.

The Franke Program in Science and the Humanities — sponsored by the Center — is also working on two major projects: the “Mapping as Knowing” lecture series and the “Understanding the Nature of Inference” colloquium series. These projects bring together experts from around the world to discuss interdisciplinary issues from unique academic perspectives.

This year, the Center also took on its first cohort of Environmental Humanities Fellows. The fellowship — given this year to nine Yale graduate students with a variety of scholarly interests and backgrounds — comes with an honorarium, mentorship opportunities and access to special programming.

The Center hopes to hold in-person events under a tent in the HQ courtyard beginning April 1.