The Whitney Humanities Center
By Whitney Humanities Center
To listen to an audio podcast, mouse over the title and click Play. Open iTunes to download and subscribe to podcasts.
Description
The Whitney Humanities Center is an interdisciplinary institution that reflects Yale’s longstanding commitment to the humanities. As well as promoting research and scholarly exchange, the Whitney hosts a wide array of public events, many of which are recorded and presented as podcasts. Highlights include the prestigious Tanner Lectures on Human Values, the Franke Lectures in the Humanities, the Schulman Lectures in Science and the Humanities, and the Finzi-Contini Lectures on European Literature. The Whitney also offers podcasts from our occasional series of public readings and talks by noted authors and concerts featuring Yale’s outstanding undergraduate musicians.
| Name | Description | Released | Price | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
1 |
The Psychobiology of Parenting and Attachment | Linda Mayes and Helena Rutherford, of the Child Study Center at Yale University, deliver a lecture on the mechanisms of influence between children and parents in the processes of development, especially with regard to psychoanalysis. | 8/20/2013 | Free | View in iTunes |
|
2 |
Carrying Off the Colosseum: British Architectural Encounters with Rome in the 1770s | Dr. Frank Salmon, Lecturer in the History of Art and Fellow of St. John’s College, Cambridge, delivers a lecture on the connections between the Classical architecture of antiquity and British architectural production in the eighteenth century. | 8/20/2013 | Free | View in iTunes |
|
3 |
The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence has Declined | Steven Pinker, Harvard College Professor and Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, delivers a lecture on the phenomenon of statistic decline in violence throughout human history. | 8/15/2013 | Free | View in iTunes |
|
4 |
Antisemitism in the Ancient Mediterranean? Early Christianity and Anti-Judaism | In fulfilling its mission to examine the whole history of Antisemitism, the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism hosts a panel discussion examining the philosophical and social origins of Anti-Judaism in Early Christianity. | 8/5/2013 | Free | View in iTunes |
|
5 |
Music and Architecture in Renaissance Venice | Prof. Deborah Howard of Cambridge University delivers a lecture on her groundbreaking research on the acoustics of Renaissance churches and other concert venues in Venice. | 7/16/2013 | Free | View in iTunes |
|
6 |
Painting Music in Renaissance Venice | Prof. David Rosand, Emeritus of Columbia University, delivers a lecture on representations of music and music making by Venetian painters in the Renaissance. | 7/16/2013 | Free | View in iTunes |
|
7 |
How the Mind Models the World: New Ideas from MRI Findings | Dr. Andrew Gerber, Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychiatry at Columbia University, delivers a lecture on the use of fMRI in the study of physchopathology and psychotherapy. | 7/15/2013 | Free | View in iTunes |
|
8 |
Sappho, Lincoln, and the Senate: Picturing Nineteenth-Century Female Desire | Simon Goldhill, Professor of Greek Literature and Culture and Fellow in Classics at King’s College, Cambridge, delivers a lecture on depictions of Sappho in the nineteenth century America, especially with regard to the female artist in the period. | 7/15/2013 | Free | View in iTunes |
|
9 |
"Michael Pollan ‘Raw’: A Conversation with Michael Pollan and Jack Hitt about cooking, eating, and writing” | Michael Pollan, critically acclaimed author and journalist, sits down with writer Jack Hitt to discuss the former’s recent work and other topics related to food and cooking. | 7/15/2013 | Free | View in iTunes |
|
10 |
Combat Trauma and the Tragic Stage: Ancient Drama and Modern Catharsis | Prof. Peter Meineck of New York University delivers a lecture on the depiction of war trauma in Ancient Greek drama, exploring the idea of “nostos” (homecoming) and its relevance to the experience of contemporary veterans. | 5/15/2013 | Free | View in iTunes |
|
11 |
Romancing Spinoza | Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, a novelist, biographer, and professor of philosophy, delivers the Franke Lecture in the Fall of 2012 on the influences of the philosopher Baruch Spinoza upon literature and the enlightenment. | 5/14/2013 | Free | View in iTunes |
|
12 |
“Slamlet” featuring Kate Tempest and Yale’s Teeth Slam Poets | Teeth Slam Poets, a spoken word poetry team at Yale University, present an evening of poems inspired by the works of William Shakespeare. The event features a guest performance by Kate Tempest, a London based spoken word artist. | 5/10/2013 | Free | View in iTunes |
|
13 |
A Translator's Confession | Jonathan Galassi, President and Publisher of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, delivers the Finzi-Contini Lecture in the Fall of 2011 on his experiences as a translator of Italian poetry into English. | 12/11/2012 | Free | View in iTunes |
|
14 |
Public Life and Festivals in Eighteenth-Century Venice | Prof. William Barcham, Emeritus of the Fashion Institute of Technology, delivers a lecture on the production of paintings of public festivals and other civic events in Venice in the eighteenth century. | 12/11/2012 | Free | View in iTunes |
|
15 |
Bollingen Prize | Celebrating the Bollingen Prize for Poetry at Yale, nearly all the living winners of this prestigious prize are brought together for a group reading sponsored by the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and the Whitney Humanities Center. | 7/23/2012 | Free | View in iTunes |
|
16 |
Adapted to a Symbolic Niche: How Less became more in Human Evolution | Terrence W. Deacon delivers a lecture on the neuroscience and development of the human capacity for language and musical perception. | 7/23/2012 | Free | View in iTunes |
|
17 |
For the Record: A Conversation Reflecting on Thirty Years of the Whitney Humanities Center | A conversation reflecting on thirty years of Yale’s Whitney Humanities Center with Peter Brooks, Founding Director, and Founding Fellows Kai Erikson, Geoffrey Hartman, and Robert Shulman is held as part of the Whitney’s 30th Anniversary celebration. | 7/23/2012 | Free | View in iTunes |
|
18 |
The Alignment and Synchronization of Brain States Through Music | In this lecture, cognitive neuroscientist Jamshed Bharucha discusses the ways that music creates emotion and how these emotions work within human interactions and relationships. | 3/15/2012 | Free | View in iTunes |
|
19 |
Galileo, Mathematics, and the Arts | Mark A. Peterson discusses Galileo’s study of mathematics in relation to the arts. Prof. Peterson argues that Galileo the mathematician, steeped in the art and literature of his day, needs to be better known, separate from his work as an astronomer. | 3/15/2012 | Free | View in iTunes |
|
20 |
Can a Novelist Write Philisophically? Panel Discussion | In this discussion, Rebecca Goldstein, Harry Frankfurt, and Michael Cunningham discuss the ways in which novelists do and do not write philosophically. The panel is chaired by Amy Hungerford. | 12/9/2011 | Free | View in iTunes |
|
21 |
Sexual Selection and the Brain: An Origin of Evolutionary Aesthetics | In this lecture, Michael Ryan discusses the relationship between animal aesthetic preferences, sexual selection, and evolutionary biology. | 12/9/2011 | Free | View in iTunes |
|
22 |
The Ancient Quarrel: Philosophy and Literature, Part One | In the first of her two Tanner Lectures, Rebecca Goldstein discusses the overlap and conflict between philosophy and the literary arts, and whether novels can be philosophically justified. | 11/17/2011 | Free | View in iTunes |
|
23 |
The Ancient Quarrel: Philosophy and Literature, Part Two | In the second of her two Tanner Lectures, Rebecca Goldstein discusses the overlap and conflict between philosophy and the literary arts, and whether novels can be philosophically justified. | 11/17/2011 | Free | View in iTunes |
|
24 |
The Power of Hospitality | Danny Meyer discusses the role and concept of hospitality in the context of the restaurant industry, and how hospitality contributes to an excellent dining experience and thus to a successful restaurant business. | 11/17/2011 | Free | View in iTunes |
|
25 |
Naming Nature: A Conversation on the Nature, Use and Limitations of Biological Taxonomies | A multi-disciplinary panel of evolutionary biologists, joined by a philosopher and an artist, discuss how and why we order and describe the natural world the way that we do now and possible alternatives. | 11/15/2011 | Free | View in iTunes |
|
26 |
Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza | Writers Adina Hoffamn and Peter Cole discuss the recovery of a cache of Hebrew manuscripts from a Cairo geniza (repository for sacred text), whose discovery and analysis have shed light on 900 years of Jewish life. | 11/15/2011 | Free | View in iTunes |
|
27 |
Art, Aesthetics, and Evolution | Noel Carroll discusses art as socio-emotional contagion: how the emotional arousal brought about by the arts provides important forms of social and emotional education that justify the social costs of the arts over the course of human history. | 11/7/2011 | Free | View in iTunes |
|
28 |
A Good Soup Holds History and Culture | Claudia Roden, critically acclaimed food writer and the 2010 Franke Visiting Fellow at the Whitney Humanities Center, shares the ingredients of her successful career chronicling, memorializing, and reconstructing cultural worlds through cooking. | 11/7/2011 | Free | View in iTunes |
|
29 |
Paleolithic Formalism and the Emergence of Music | In his lecture, Gary Tomlinson discusses the complex co-evolution of human music making in relation to language, technology, and cognitive and imaginative development. | 11/7/2011 | Free | View in iTunes |
|
30 |
Why Books Still Matter | John Donatich, director of Yale University Press, delivers the keynote address of “Why Books Still Matter,” a conference commemorating the one-hundredth anniversary of the Press | 10/13/2011 | Free | View in iTunes |
|
31 |
Inscribing Food/Talking Life: New Orleans Past | Susan Tucker, Curator of Books and Records at the Newcomb Center for Research on Women, Tulane University, gives the third Franke lecture in the series “History of Food and Cuisine.” Her talk is entitled “Inscribing Food/Talking Life: New Orlean | 10/13/2011 | Free | View in iTunes |
|
32 |
Banquets and Politics in China | Joanna Waley-Cohen of New York University delivers the first Franke lecture in the 2011 series, “History of Food and Cuisine.” Her talk is titled “Banquets and Politics in China.” | 10/13/2011 | Free | View in iTunes |
|
33 |
Sublime Science in the Late Enlightenment: Adam Walker and the Eidouranion | Jan Golinski discusses how early 19th century popular science lecturers evoked the discourse of the sublime, thereby continuing to advance Enlightenment claims about progress in human reason and culture, despite the rise of conservative Regency values. | 10/12/2011 | Free | View in iTunes |
|
34 |
The First Vienna Circle | Music at the Whitney presents songs and chamber music by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert performed by Yale undergraduate music students in conjunction with the 2008 Tanner Lectures on Human Values and a series of events on intellectual circles. | 10/11/2011 | Free | View in iTunes |
|
35 |
Shake, Rattle, and Roll! | Music at the Whitney and Yale College New Music present chamber works composed by Yale College students and faculty, performed with members of the Yale Percussion Group. | 1/6/2011 | Free | View in iTunes |
|
36 |
Adonis visits the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University | Adonis is a Syrian poet and essayist who led the modernist movement in Arabic poetry in the second half of the 20th century.In this netcast, he and Khaled Mattawa read from Adonis: A Selection, published by Yale University Press. | 1/6/2011 | Free | View in iTunes |
|
37 |
Science Building(s) Collaboration | Yale’s Whitney Humanities Center presents “Science Building(s) Collaboration,” a panel discussion considering Louis Kahn’s Salk Institute and what makes buildings work for science. | 12/21/2010 | Free | View in iTunes |
|
38 |
The Founders of Modern Physics | Yale’s Whitney Humanities Center presents “The Founders of Modern Physics,” a panel discussion among eminent scientists exploring the revolution in quantum mechanics and its intellectual milieu. | 12/21/2010 | Free | View in iTunes |
|
39 |
William Bailey and Mark Strand in Conversation | The Whitney Humanities Center presents William Bailey and Mark Strand in conversation. The artist and the poet joined in discussion to celebrate the opening of the exhibition “William Bailey Works on Paper: Temperas, Drawings, and Prints.” | 12/14/2010 | Free | View in iTunes |
|
40 |
“The Sainte-Chapelle in Paris: Kingship, Crusading, and Legacy of Louis IX” | In her 2010 Franke Lecture, Alyce Jordan speaks about the Sainte-Chapelle as an activated liturgical and royal space and how and why Louis the Ninth’s chapel proved such a successful vehicle for the articulation of his own monarchic agenda. | 11/17/2010 | Free | View in iTunes |
|
41 |
"Guibert de Nogent and His Demons" | Jay Rubenstein discusses the 11th century monk and autobiographer, Guibert de Nogent, and works to place him in the particular intellectual and built environments of his time and location, though only fragmentary evidence from these environments survive | 9/9/2010 | Free | View in iTunes |
|
42 |
“emergent(cies)…,” | In her 2008 Franke Lecture, anthropologist Carolyn Nordstrom examines invisible networks of social spaces and interactions, especially the dangerous extra-state and extra-legal interactions that we are meant not to see. Paul Farmer responds to this tal | 9/8/2010 | Free | View in iTunes |
|
43 |
Golden Eras of Scientific Institutions | In the second of his two Tanner Lectures, Prof. Steven Chu draws on his experience at Bell Labs and Stanford’s Bio-X to discuss what best enables institutions to support effective interdisciplinary collaboration and scientific progress. | 9/8/2010 | Free | View in iTunes |
|
44 |
“Romanesque and Gothic as Biblical Architecture” | Walter Cahn, Carnegie Professor Emeritus of the History of Art at Yale, delivers the first Franke Lecture in the 2010 series, “The Age of Cathedrals.” Mr. Cahn discusses Romanesque and Gothic as self-consciously biblical architectural forms. | 9/8/2010 | Free | View in iTunes |
|
45 |
Spatial Thinking | In her 2009 Franke Lecture, Prof. Barbara Tversky will speak on space and how it is accessed by many modalities. Prof. Tversky demonstrates how spatial knowledge is essential for survival and primary among the things in spaces is our body. | 9/7/2010 | Free | View in iTunes |
|
46 |
Map of a Vanished Town: Recollecting the Palestinian Past through Biography | In her 2008 Franke Lecture, essayist and biographer Adina Hoffman talks about the relation between the life of Palestinian poet Taha Muhammad Ali and the “erased landscape” of his former village, what Robert Frost calls “a town that is no more a t | 9/7/2010 | Free | View in iTunes |
|
47 |
Poetry Reading | In his 2009 poetry reading at the Whitney Humanities Center, award-winning poet and translator Peter Cole reads poems by medieval poets writing in Spanish and Hebrew, as well as from his own recent work, some of which also draws on medieval sources. | 9/7/2010 | Free | View in iTunes |
|
48 |
Doctor Atomic and His Gadget: Composing the American Mythology | In the second of his Tanner lectures, Adams discusses how signal events in a nation's history can rise to the mythic level and why, despite controversies, he regards these mythic events as rich and legitimate material for musical and dramatic treatment. | 9/7/2010 | Free | View in iTunes |
|
49 |
Doctor Faustus and His Composition: Reflections on Thomas Mann's Fictional Composer | n this first Tanner Lecture, Adams discusses how Thomas Mann uses the Faust myth to show obsession with order and objectivity leads to creative sterility and cultural barbarism. Adams also examines his own compositional practices in this context. | 9/7/2010 | Free | View in iTunes |
|
50 |
A Universe of One's Own: Cosmology, Theology and Atheology | Prof. Taede Smedes explores cosmology, theology and atheology in his talk as first lecturer for the Shulman Lectures at the Whitney Humanities Center. | 7/29/2010 | Free | View in iTunes |
|
51 |
Heaven or Heat Death? Christian and Scientific Perspectives on the End of the Universe | Brother Guy Consolmagno SJ, distinguished guest and planetary scientist at the Vatican Observatory, discusses religious and scientific views of the end of the Universe at the second Shulman Lecture of 2008 at the Whitney Humanities Center. | 7/29/2010 | Free | View in iTunes |
|
52 |
Cross-Cultural Reflections on Religion and Science | Joseph Prabhu, a Professor at California State University, Los Angeles, speaks on cross-cultural reflections on religion and science at the third Shulman Lecture of 2008 at the Whitney Humanities Center. | 7/29/2010 | Free | View in iTunes |
|
53 |
The Epistemology of Physics and Scientific Revolutions | In the first of his two Tanner Lectures, Prof. Chu gives a lively history of the ways in which scientific revolutions build on previous scientific revolutions, focusing on physics from Ptolemy to Copernicus, Kepler and Newton, and on to today’s theori | 7/29/2010 | Free | View in iTunes |
|
54 |
Darwin and the Challenge of Biography | Janet Browne, a leading specialist on Charles Darwin and his life’s work, is the author of the multiple prize-winning, two-volume biography, Charles Darwin: Voyaging (1995) and Charles Darwin: The Power of Place (2002). | 7/29/2010 | Free | View in iTunes |
|
55 |
How the Victorians Learned about Darwin's Theories: Popularizing Evolution | Bernard Lightman’s research focuses on the cultural history of Victorian science. In speaking about the popularization of and attacks upon Darwin’s theories of evolution and natural selection, he draws on his 2007 study Victorian Popularizers of Sc | 7/29/2010 | Free | View in iTunes |
| 55 Items |
