
Upcoming Events

How (And Why) Do We Represent Nature?
This question invites us to consider “representation” in both its political meaning and its aesthetic meaning. “Nature” is represented in paintings, poems, scripture, music, dancing, novels, laws, regulations, equations, activisms, and advertising campaigns.
This question asks how environments—and often their relations to human concerns—are represented across media, geographic and cultural contexts, and different historical moments.

2024-2025 Tucker Boatwright Festival of Literature & the Arts
The Nature of Representation
The Nature of Representation asks how our understandings of “nature” have been shaped by representational practices in both the aesthetic and political senses, exploring how the current climate catastrophe is inextricable from colonialism and anthropocentric worldviews. The festival features contemporary writers, artists, and thinkers who don’t take for granted that language is merely human, that there are other “natural” languages, and that attuning to those other languages allows us to tell stories that disrupt the violence of Man.
Feature Stories




Humanities Faculty News

Michelle Kahn, associate professor of history, was appointed as editor of Contemporary European History, an international peer-reviewed journal that publishes scholarship on European history from 1914 onwards.
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Nathan Snaza, director of the Humanities Center and professor of English, published Animate Literacies: Literature, Affect, and the Politics of Humanism by Duke University Press.
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Nathan Snaza, assistant professor of English, published Tendings: Feminist Esoterisms and the Abolition of Man by Duke University Press.
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Nathan Snaza, assistant professor of English, published "Why This? Affective Pedagogy in the Wake" in The Affect Theory Reader 2: Worldings, Tensions, Futures.
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