Yale Bulletin and Calendar

October 21, 2005|Volume 34, Number 8

María Rosa Menocal

In Focus: Whitney Humanities Center

Center is retreat for 'conversations
across the arts and sciences'

The Whitney Humanities Center at Yale is an internationally renowned organization dedicated to promoting and sustaining the liberal arts at Yale.

For 25 years the Whitney has drawn on a fusion of cultural traditions and academic disciplines to bring to the Yale community and the public at large a host of intellectually stimulating events. These range from lectures, symposia and exhibitions to poetry readings, theatrical productions and film screenings.

Housed in a Tudor-style brick building at the intersection of the Yale campus and New Haven's central business district, the Whitney is the venue of many of the Directed Studies core curriculum activities for Yale College freshmen. It is also the hub of the Medieval Studies, Renaissance Studies and Film Studies programs, as well as the humanities major, which fosters Yale student appreciation of arts, literature and philosophy.

In a fast-paced, high-tech, jargon-riddled world, the Whitney is a retreat where thought-provoking conversation and exchange of ideas is the standard fare. In this sense, the Whitney functions as a gathering place beyond home and office where local denizens can linger to chat about the day's events. The patrons of the Whitney, though, are distinguished scholars, and more often than not, their conversations concern the highest cultural achievements of the past 10 millennia -- from cave drawings to the films of Alfred Hitchcock.

In fact, the fellows of the Whitney Humanities Center -- most of whom are chosen from the Yale faculty for one- to three-year terms -- meet there once a week to discuss their own scholarship and to generate dialogue among their peers, Yale students and other visitors. Different working groups made up of senior and junior faculty members, graduate students and undergraduates meet at the Whitney regularly to explore such interdisciplinary topics as "American Religious History," "Mind, Brain, Culture and Consciousness" and "Science, Technology, and Utopian Visions."

The Whitney is also the home base of the Howard R. Lamar Center for the Study of Frontiers and Borders, which often hosts its own events. As the repository of thousands of 16-mm films, laser discs, DVDs and VHS tapes, the Whitney is also the seat of the Film Study Center and the newly established Cinema at the Whitney -- literally so, since the center houses the only auditorium on campus where 35-mm films are screened. The Cinema has recently established a Friday night film series open to the general public.

The Whitney makes its presence most palpable on the Yale campus, in the New Haven community and in the larger academic world through its noted lecture series: the Tanner Lectures on Human Values (see related story), the Finzi-Contini Lectures on European Literature, and the Franke Seminars and Lectures in the Humanities. This week, memoirist Ruth Reichl, the doyenne of food writers, will deliver the annual Tanner Lectures, titled "Why Food Matters." (See related story, below.) The spring Franke Lecture series, which will celebrate biography as a literary genre and a method of history, is designed to appeal to the general public.

Earlier this semester the Whitney hosted an all-campus celebration of the 400th anniversary of the publication of "Don Quixote." A two-day conference brought together Cervantes scholars from around the country and their colleagues at Yale for an examination of the novel's far-reaching influence in Western culture. In conjunction with the conference, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library displayed its first editions of the book, and The Cinema at the Whitney showed two related films: the 1953 Russian version by Grigori Kozintsev and "Lost in La Mancha," a documentary about Terry Gilliam's quixotic and doomed attempt to make his own movie of the Spanish classic.

These signature programs bring scholars, writers, poets and performers -- masters of whatever field they represent -- from around the world to Yale, where they can congregate and exchange ideas with Yale students, faculty and their distinguished guests.

The current director of the Whitney is María Rosa Menocal, the R. Selden Rose Professor of Spanish, a scholar of medieval culture and the author of the critically acclaimed "The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain."

"Yale has among the most distinguished departments in the humanities, and we are building from that strength," says Menocal, who sees the Whitney's mission as extending well beyond the Yale curriculum, principally by creating a congenial setting where scholars from different disciplines and departments -- often surprisingly isolated from each other, she notes -- can come together.

"By providing a forum for Yale scholars, visiting fellows and guest lecturers and programs to enrich the cross-disciplinary education of Yale students, the Whitney not only maintains the humanities as a cornerstone of undergraduate education, it also becomes the university's center for conversations across the arts and sciences," says Menocal.

In addition to the Tanner Lectures and related events, other upcoming Whitney Humanities Center events include:

* Nov. 7: Louise Glück, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, former U.S. poet laureate, and the Rosenkranz Writer-in-Residence at Yale, will introduce the winners of the Yale Younger Poets Prize. The three recipients -- Jay Hopler, Richard Siken and Peter Streckfus -- will read from their work. Awarded since 1919, the Yale Younger Poets Prize is the oldest literary award in America.

* Nov. 16: The Whitney presents "For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise," an original musical and visual rendition of William Blake's allegorical book of verse and drawings, first published in 1793 as "For Children: The Gates of Paradise." The music was composed for solo piano by Professor Martin Bresnick of the School of Music. Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of the Humanities, will introduce and moderate this production.

For more information about these and other events, contact manana.sikic@yale.edu. For more information about the Whitney Humanities Center, visit the website at www.yale.edu/whc.

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