The Beinecke Library and Yale Public Humanities jointly present “Three Conversations on Contemporary Biography.” Speakers will include Heather Clark, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Robin D. G. Kelley, Nathan Kernan, Eileen Myles, and Francesca Wade.
Free and Open to the Public
Join us for a special talk by Josh Kun, “Listening to Lampedusa: Music, Migration, and the Mediterranean.” Josh Kun is a cultural historian, author, curator, and MacArthur Fellow. He has been the recipient of a Berlin Prize and an American Book Award and is a 2025 Grammy Nominee. His books include Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America; Songs in the Key of Los Angeles; Double Vision: The Photography of George Rodriguez, and several others.
Friday, April 4, 2025
HQ 131 (320 York Street)
Join us for a symposium on the 50th anniversary of John Ashbery’s volume, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975). Free and open to the public.
Schedule:
The Quilters (2024), directed by Jenifer McShane, follows the daily lives of several quilters inside the sewing room at South Central Correctional Center, a Level 5 maximum security prison in a small town in Missouri. In tracking several quilts from design to completion, audiences come to know these men, witnessing their struggles, triumphs, and sense of pride as they create something beautiful in this windowless sacred space, deep within the prison walls. The film was recently shortlisted for the Documentary Short Film category for the 97th Academy Awards.
Join us for a special film screening and discussion of Calls From Home, a 2023 short film directed by Sylvia Ryerson, a Yale PhD student in American Studies. Ryerson will be in conversation with Matthew Jacobson (co-director of the Yale Public Humanities Program and the Sterling Professor of American Studies, History & African American Studies at Yale) and Elizabeth Hinton (Professor of History, African American Studies & Law at Yale).
Join us for a conversation with Clara Mejia Orta, a fourth year PhD student in the History department, as she discusses her project “Essential NOT Disposable: Oral Histories of Meatpacking Workers during the COVID-19 Pandemic.” Presented as part of the Public Humanities Working Group (PHWG).
In recognition of the 2023 Day With(out) Art, the Yale Office of LGBTQ Resources, the Yale University Art Gallery, the Yale Center for British Art, and Public Humanities at Yale are proud to partner with Visual AIDS to present Everyone I Know is Sick, a screening of five short videos highlighting connections between HIV and other forms of illness and disability. The program features work by Dorothy Cheung, Hiura Fernandes and Lili Nascimento, Beau Gomez, Dolissa Medina and Ananias P. Soria, Vasilios Papapitsios, and Kurt Weston.
Join us for a conversation with Dr. Dario Valles, Assistant Professor of Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies at California State University, Long Beach, an interdisciplinary anthropologist whose research lies at the intersection of gender/sexuality, race, transnational migration and technology linking Central America, Mexico and the US. Dr. Valles’ current work includes developing a feature-length, participatory documentary entitled No Separate Survival on the global asylum crisis converging in Mexico.
How does community-based archiving reimagine the conventional archive? Join us for a conversation about community-based archiving with Nancy Escalante, PhD Candidate in American Studies, as she talks about her dissertation project. She will discuss the María Guardado Collective and raise questions about conventional forms of knowledge production and the usefulness of thinking with a “counter-archive.” Escalante’s project explores how U.S.
Join us for a conversation with Matthew Jacobson (co-director of the Yale Public Humanities Program and the Sterling Professor of American Studies, History & African American Studies at Yale) and Robin D. G. Kelley (the Gary B. Nash Professor of American History at the University of California, Los Angeles) on Professor Jacobson’s new book, “Dancing Down the Barricades: Sammy Davis Jr. and the Long Civil Rights Era, A Cultural History” (University of California Press, 2023).
