Maptivists Promotes Youth Safety and Wellbeing
Nov. 10, 2020—Danielle Wilfong is the 2020-2021 RPW Center HASTAC Scholar We started our research project as an immersive tour of Nashville. Then, COVID-19 happened. Over the last four years, Maptivists, a cadre of high-school-aged researchers supported and trained by Oasis Center, Vanderbilt University, and Tennessee State University, has investigated how Nashville’s youth experience safety and wellbeing...
Meet a Fellow: Mohammed Allehbi
Nov. 3, 2020—Mohammed Allehbi is the 2020-2021 George J. Graham Jr. Graduate Student Fellow from the Department of History. A sixth-year Ph.D. student in medieval Islamic history, his research focuses on the late Abbasid era. What is your research about and why does it matter? My dissertation is the first comprehensive study of the legal rift and political-divide...
History and My Pandemic Journal – Steve Rubenfeld
Oct. 27, 2020—Steve Rubenfeld participated in this summer’s “Rethinking Pandemics: A Cultural History from Antiquity to Now” course offered through the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) at Vanderbilt. OLLI helps adults over 50 rediscover the joy of learning and build community through diverse social interaction. Steve provided a video flip-through of his journal below, followed by his thoughts on the...
“Rethinking Pandemics” Course – Deana Byrnes
Oct. 20, 2020—This summer the RPW Center teamed up with Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) at Vanderbilt to offer an online course for its members entitled “Rethinking Pandemics: A Cultural History from Antiquity to Now.” OLLI helps adults over 50 rediscover the joy of learning and build community through diverse social interaction. Deana Byrnes was one of...
Meet a Fellow: Claire Sisco King
Oct. 13, 2020—Meet Claire Sisco King, a 2020-2021 RPW Center Faculty Fellow. This year’s group is exploring the theme of “Imagining Cities.” What does the phrase “Imagining Cities” mean to you? The phrase “Imagining Cities” suggests the coextensive relationship between ideas about what cities are, or should be, and their material instantiations. Central to this relationship are...
“The question is: how to be isolated without having to be insulated?”
Oct. 6, 2020—Sarah Kareem is Associate Professor of English at UCLA “The question is: how to be isolated without having to be insulated?” (D. W. Winnicott, “Communicating and Not Communicating Leading to a Study of Certain Opposites,” 1965) I’ve been thinking a lot lately about a late-nineteenth-century illustration to Jane Austen’s 1813 novel, Pride and Prejudice. The illustration,...
2020 Southern Festival of Books
Sep. 29, 2020—Serenity Gerbman, Director of Literature and Language Programs at Humanities Tennessee. For the first time in more than twenty years, I am not worried about rain in October. As Director of the Southern Festival of Books, which is in normal times an indoor-outdoor event, the weather forecast this time of year has always camped out in a back corner of...
Welcome!
Sep. 28, 2020—Holly Tucker, Director of the Robert Penn Warren for the Center of Humanities. Welcome to our new blog, Humanities in Conversation! As director of the RPW Center, the best part of my job is getting to sit down with students, faculty, staff, administration, and community leaders at the historic Vaughn Home on the Vanderbilt campus. I learn so much from...