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News & Events

In Exile Documentary

Friday, Nov. 7, 2025, Harris Theater, Pittsburgh Cultural Trust

Off the Shelves: Public Scholarship & Trade Publishing

A six-part workshop series for faculty interested in public-facing writing and trade publishing. Fall 2025 and Spring 2026

A Constitution Day Symposium.

A Constitution Day symposium at Ä¢¹½Av exploring the U.S. Constitution through law, history, literature, religion, philosophy, and the humanities.

Make Research Come Alive in the Humanities, Arts & Social Sciences

Thursday, Apr. 17, 2025 9 - 12:00 p.m, William Pitt Union, University of Pittsburgh.

2025 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize

Tuesday, Apr. 8, 2025, 8-9:00 p.m., Zoom

CAUSE 30th Anniversary Celebration and Conference.

Friday, Apr. 11 - Saturday Apr 12, 2025, Cohon University Center
Environmental Humanities Slam

Environmental Humanities Slam

Tuesday, Apr. 1, 2025, 4:00 to 5:30 p.m., Posvar Hall, University of Pittsburgh
Film Screening: The Cost of Inheritance

Film Screening: The Cost of Inheritance

Friday, Oct. 18, 2024 6:00 to 7:30 p.m., McConomy Auditorium, Cohon University Center
The Search for New Frontiers and the Making of Modern China

The Search for New Frontiers and the Making of Modern China

Wednesday, Sept. 25, 2024, 5:00 to 6:30 p.m., Connan Room, Cohon University Center
The US Militia Movement and the Dangers Militias Pose in 2024

The US Militia Movement and the Dangers Militias Pose in 2024

Thursday, Apr. 18, 2024, 5:00 PM, Steinberg Auditorium (BH A53)
"Concerning Any Violence Necessary"

"Concerning Any Violence Necessary"

Thursday, Feb. 22, 2024, 5:00 PM, Steinberg Auditorium (BH A53)
Political Theology in a Cartel Training Camp

Political Theology in a Cartel Training Camp

Thursday, Jan. 25, 2024 5:00 PM, Posner Grand Room
"The Birth of a Nation" and the Origins of Cinematic Vigilantism

"The Birth of a Nation" and the Origins of Cinematic Vigilantism

Thursday, Nov. 30, 2023, 5:00, Steinberg Auditorium (BH A53)
"Winter Counts" Faculty Workshop Discussion

"Winter Counts" Faculty Workshop Discussion

Thursday, Nov. 16, 2023, 12:00pm, Posner Grand Room
The Machine That Would Catch Slaves Of Itself: 90 Years of the Anti-Somerset US Constitution and its Nemesis, Black Solidarity

The Machine That Would Catch Slaves Of Itself: 90 Years of the Anti-Somerset US Constitution and its Nemesis, Black Solidarity

Thursday, Oct. 26, 2023, 5:00pm
Frontier Rebels: The Vigilante Origins of the American Revolution, 1765-1776

Frontier Rebels: The Vigilante Origins of the American Revolution, 1765-1776

Thursday, Oct. 5, 2023, 5:00, Steinberg Auditorium (BH A53)
Teaching the Deconstructive Moment: A History of the Yale School’s Pedagogical Project

Teaching the Deconstructive Moment: A History of the Yale School’s Pedagogical Project

Thursday, Mar 30, 2023, 4:30pm, Posner Grand Room (Posner Hall 340)
Studying the Novel in the Climate Crisis

Studying the Novel in the Climate Crisis

March 23rd at 4:30pm, Posner Grand Room (Posner Hall 340)
Feminist Criticism in the 1970s

Feminist Criticism in the 1970s

Feb. 23rd at 4:30pm, Posner Grand Room
The End of Aesthetic History; or, The Weirdness of the Twentieth Century

The End of Aesthetic History; or, The Weirdness of the Twentieth Century

Dec. 1st at 4:30pm, BH A53, Steinberg Auditorium
Atrocities and Elevators

Atrocities and Elevators

Nov. 10th at 3:00pm, POS 340 (Posner Grand Room)
Immediacy: Some Theses on Cultural Style

Immediacy: Some Theses on Cultural Style

Sept. 22nd at 4:30pm; Sept. 23 noon-1:15pm
Baltimore After Progress

Baltimore After Progress

Feb. 24 @ 4:30 p.m. ET, Feb. 25 @ 12 p.m. ET
Climate Justice Lecture & Seminar with May Joseph

Climate Justice Lecture & Seminar with May Joseph

Mar. 31 @ 4:30 p.m. ET
Epoch of Loss

Epoch of Loss

Thursday Nov. 11 4:30pm, Friday Nov. 12 12:00pm
Alice Julier Lecture and Seminar

Alice Julier Lecture and Seminar

Oct. 21 @ 4:30 p.m. ET, Oct. 22 @ 12 p.m. ET
Panel Discussion: Communicating Climate Change

Panel Discussion: Communicating Climate Change

Tuesday, Oct. 12 @ 4:30 p.m. ET
America's Energy Gamble: People, Economy and Planet

America's Energy Gamble: People, Economy and Planet

Mar. 17 @ 4:30 p.m. ET
COVID Conversations Part II – Visual Narratives

COVID Conversations Part II – Visual Narratives

Thursday, April 22nd – Time TBD
COVID Conversations Part I -Oral Narratives from a Global Perspective

COVID Conversations Part I -Oral Narratives from a Global Perspective

Thursday, February 11th
Experiences of Hunger and Food Insecurity in College

Experiences of Hunger and Food Insecurity in College

Monday, November 9th
Vibrant Storytelling, or, How to Connect in a Pandemic

Vibrant Storytelling, or, How to Connect in a Pandemic

Monday, September 21
A Community Study of a Food Oasis in the East End of Pittsburgh

A Community Study of a Food Oasis in the East End of Pittsburgh

Wednesday, January 29
Urban Water Governance as a Wicked Problem

Urban Water Governance as a Wicked Problem

Wednesday, October 23
Human Right to Water and Water Justice

Human Right to Water and Water Justice

Wednesday, September 25
The Poisoned City: Flint’s Water and the American Urban Tragedy

The Poisoned City: Flint’s Water and the American Urban Tragedy

Wednesday, September 11
Bread and Water: Access, Belonging, and Environmental Justice in the City

Bread and Water: Access, Belonging, and Environmental Justice in the City

Bread and Water: Access, Belonging, and Environmental Justice in the City
Uncertainty, Information, and Narrative: A Statistical Perspective on Scientific Storytelling

Uncertainty, Information, and Narrative: A Statistical Perspective on Scientific Storytelling

Thursday, March 28
Hayden White and the Ethics of Truth

Hayden White and the Ethics of Truth

Friday, February 1
Spring 2019 Events

Spring 2019 Events

Spring 2019 Events
Movies, Narrative, and Emotions

Movies, Narrative, and Emotions

Thursday, February 28
Computational Narrative Intelligence

Computational Narrative Intelligence

Tuesday, October 30
Empathy and Immersion Reading (on paper and on screen)

Empathy and Immersion Reading (on paper and on screen)

Monday, October 8
Manufacturing Mischief

Manufacturing Mischief

May 10-12, 2018
Great Minds Don't Always Think Alike

Great Minds Don't Always Think Alike

A deep look at the hidden history of autism and the promise of a future in which everyone is given the support they need to reach their maximum potential.
Marx@200 Art Exhibition

Marx@200 Art Exhibition

Karl Marx is one of the most influential and controversial thinkers in history. To explore Marx’s continued influence at the time of his bicentennial, the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust and Ä¢¹½Av’s Humanities Center will present Marx@200 from April 6 through June 3 at SPACE gallery in downtown Pittsburgh.
Poet and Translator Dan Rosenberg

Poet and Translator Dan Rosenberg

Monday, March 26
Love, Capital, and Writing Marx’s History

Love, Capital, and Writing Marx’s History

At this event we will learn what it was like for Gabriel and Sperber to research and write about Marx, and how two prize-winning historians can see the same historical figure so differently.
Building Communities of Power and Resistance in the Age of Trump

Building Communities of Power and Resistance in the Age of Trump

What can ordinary people do to gain power in the age of Trump? Find out at this talk by Jennifer Epps-Addison at the Center for Popular Democracy (CPD)—a high profile social justice organization focused on progressive policy-making and grassroots organizing.
Robotics, Pittsburgh and the Future of Work

Robotics, Pittsburgh and the Future of Work

What is the future of work? While some are sounding the alarm bell about the likelihood that American workers will soon be replaced by robots, at the Advanced Robotics for Manufacturing Institute, Suzy Teele argues that there will be manufacturing jobs in the future—they will just be different jobs.
Marx@200 Inaugural Event

Marx@200 Inaugural Event

For the last 50 years Karl Marx has been a central figure for the humanities—we have used his work to explain history, to analyze art, to philosophize, and to interpret literature. According to one study Marx is the single most frequently cited scholar in the humanities.
Documentary filmmaker Steve James

Documentary filmmaker Steve James

Documentary filmmaker Steve James (Hoop Dreams, The Interrupters, Life Itself) will be speaking at both the Pittsburgh Humanities Festival and the Carnegie Mellon International Film Festival.
Pittsburgh Humanities Festival 2017

Pittsburgh Humanities Festival 2017

The Pittsburgh Humanities Festival, a production of the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust and the Humanities Center of Ä¢¹½Av, is a three-day gathering of internationally-renowned academics, artists, and intellectual innovators in Pittsburgh’s Cultural District.
2017 Carnegie Mellon International Film Festival

2017 Carnegie Mellon International Film Festival

Entering its 11th year, the CMU IFF will encourage and provoke contemporary conversations about race, sexuality, gender, and ethnicity through its 2017 theme, “Faces of Identity.”
Unlocking Everyday Treasures

Unlocking Everyday Treasures

The talk will discuss the vital cultural mission of the Smithsonian National Museum of African-American History and Culture and the ways in which the transition from analog sources to digital media affects all that mission.
Less Than Zeros and Ones

Less Than Zeros and Ones

The talk will discuss various aspects of animation technique, as well as the changes wrought by the move from analog to digital methods of production and exhibition, and will include excerpts of Duesing’s work.
Arclights and Zoom Lenses

Arclights and Zoom Lenses

This talk featuring Professor Eric Hoyt will discuss various aspects of Digital Humanities research methods including the ways in which the choice of approach illuminates some sources but not others, and how toggling between larger and smaller scales of data may both enlighten and obscure our vision.
Copyright & Culture

Copyright & Culture

The central theme of this panel is an examination of issues of copyright, especially in relation to visual media. Of particular interest are the ways in which the transformation from analog to digital environments has altered the balance of competing interests, and the ways in which copyright law may address those changes in the future.​
Living on the Internet

Living on the Internet

This lecture will be the first based on our theme, “Digital Futures: Bringing the Analog Past to a Digital Age,” the general purpose of which is to encourage a discussion of the ways in which the advent of digital media has influenced scholarship across the Humanities (with a particular emphasis on film and media studies).
Harbingers of Future War

Harbingers of Future War

In recent years, many of the difficulties encountered in strategic decision making, operational planning, training, and force development stemmed from neglect of continuities in the nature of war.
Unmanned

Unmanned

The Humanities Center presents “Unmanned,” a staged reading of a play by Robert Myers.
Horses of the Apocalypse

Horses of the Apocalypse

Norman M. Naimark is Robert and Florence McDonnell Professor of East European Studies in the History Department at Stanford University, and is Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Freeman-Spogli Institute.
(T)ERROR Film Screening with Co-Filmmaker, Lyric R. Cabral

(T)ERROR Film Screening with Co-Filmmaker, Lyric R. Cabral

(T)ERROR, shot in our very own Pittsburgh, goes undercover to follow an FBI informant on an assignment to befriend a Wilkinsburg man suspected of being a Taliban sympathizer.
From Total War to Perpetual Interwar

From Total War to Perpetual Interwar

What range of meanings is covered by the expression total war? What do we know about its origin and mutations? Does it have any currency in 2015? This talk traces the expression’s first use during the First World War, follows its coded elaboration by 1920s air power theorists, and tracks it from its reemergence in the shadow of the Second World War to its apogee in the nuclear condition.
War in the Age of Antisocial Media

War in the Age of Antisocial Media

Jan Mieszkowski received his B.A. summa cum laude from Yale University in 1990 and his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins in 1998. He has also studied in Paris and Berlin
War and the Humanities

War and the Humanities

Rick Atkinson is a best-selling author, Pulitzer Prize winner, and Washington Post journalist. He is the author of the Liberation Trilogy, a narrative history of the liberation of Europe in World War II.
Fresh Perspectives with NEH Chair Dr. William Adams

Fresh Perspectives with NEH Chair Dr. William Adams

The Humanities Center welcomes National Endowment for Humanities Chair Dr. William Adams to Carnegie Mellon.
Pittsburgh Humanities Festival

Pittsburgh Humanities Festival

Ä¢¹½Av and the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust are teaming up to bring new ideas and engaging conversation to the city with the inaugural Pittsburgh Humanities Festival from March 26-29.
Why Nature is Musical

Why Nature is Musical

David Rothenberg has long been interested in the musicality of sounds made by inhabitants of the animal world. He has jammed live with lyrebirds, broadcast his clarinet underwater for humpback whales, and covered himself in thirteen-year cicadas to wail away inside a wash of white noise.
A Panel on Music and Politics

A Panel on Music and Politics

Historically, most people probably regarded music as having little to do with politics, since music is not representational. Yet there have long been connections drawn between the two, and, more recently, popular music and musicians have been understood as making significant contributions on controversial issues.
Rock Stardom and Listening

Rock Stardom and Listening

Rock Star: The Making of Cultural Icons from Elvis to Springsteen is an informal history of rock stardom. It looks at the careers and cultural legacies of seven rock stars—Elvis Presley, James Brown, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, the Grateful Dead, Joni Mitchell, and Bruce Springsteen.
Phonographc Music

Phonographc Music

Alex Ross writes about classical music, covering the field from the Metropolitan Opera to the downtown avant-garde. He has also written essays on pop music, literature, 20th century history and gay life.
Decolonizing the Ear

Decolonizing the Ear

It is a study of the dramatic transformations in vernacular musics that take place around the world in the years between 1925 and 1931 in the wake of electrical recording...
Faces of the Humanities

Faces of the Humanities

How might a focus on race and ethnicity in the postcolonial world be articulated to the "crisis" in the humanities we keep hearing about in the media today? What kinds of faces does the humanities have, and how do these faces speak?
The Humanities as the source of Restless Freedom

The Humanities as the source of Restless Freedom

When we attended more carefully and seriously to the motto, “Liberty-Work-Dignity,” pronounced by the under-employed university graduates who inaugurated the Tunisian Revolution in 2010...
Delinking From the Global University

Delinking From the Global University

Walter Mignolo lectures on the meaning of today’s responses to the coloniality of knowledge (in general terms, including art, religions, the disciplines) created and maintained by Western universities from the Renaissance through the Enlightenment to the Global/Corporate University.
MOOCs From Many Angles

MOOCs From Many Angles

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are often posed as a means to fix the problems of higher education. The best education money can buy seems to be only a click away for students all over the globe. Not surprisingly, this new model of higher education has generated great controversy for the teachers and students in more traditional programs and universities.
Origins of the American Campus

Origins of the American Campus

The unique spatial form of the modern American campus originates as a product of the late nineteenth century socio-economic struggle between labor and capital.
Humanities on the Edge

Humanities on the Edge

The spread of Western knowledge in the age of globalization that began in the nineteenth century was in its own way as powerful a force as the political and economic transformations of imperialism.
Global or World Universities?

Global or World Universities?

At the height of the millennial frenzy announcing the imminent advent of globalization and the reign of a knowledge economy, a number of universities launched expansion projects, entering into partnerships with foreign universities, and, increasingly, building new campuses, from Asia to the Middle East.
Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle

Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle

Raiford analyzes why activists chose photography over other media, explores the doubts some individuals had about the strategies, and shows how photography became an increasingly effective, if complex, tool in representing black political interests.
Neuroscience and the Literary History of Mind: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Attention in Jane Austen

Neuroscience and the Literary History of Mind: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Attention in Jane Austen

Natalie Phillips, Assistant Professor of English at Michigan State University, specializes in 18th-century literature, the history of mind, and cognitive approaches to narrative.
Too Big to See: The Visual Culture of Economic Rights

Too Big to See: The Visual Culture of Economic Rights

This talk features the work of our 2012-2013 CMU Humanities Center Senior Research Fellow, Leshu Torchin.
When Homeland Terror Passes for Bureaucratic Security: The Wire Meets The Office

When Homeland Terror Passes for Bureaucratic Security: The Wire Meets The Office

Do you know what the NBC comedy The Office has in common with the HBO series, The Wire? The idea that in a hierarchy every employee rises to his or her level of incompetence.
The Media are a Force…but for What?

The Media are a Force…but for What?

Brooke Gladstone is managing editor and co-host of On the Media. After working in print media, she joined NPR in 1987 as senior editor of Weekend Edition.
Roundtable on the Origins of Occupy Wall Street

Roundtable on the Origins of Occupy Wall Street
Anne Balsamo Lecture

Anne Balsamo Lecture

In response to the Imagining Planetarity project, Anne Balsamo will address one of its key questions: how might the world to come be thought into existence constructively?
The Beneficiary: Cosmopolitanism and Inequality

The Beneficiary: Cosmopolitanism and Inequality
The Right to Look; Or, Why We Occupy

The Right to Look; Or, Why We Occupy
Istvan Csicsery-Ronay

Istvan Csicsery-Ronay
Critical Strangeness: Art, Displacement and Parrhesia

Critical Strangeness: Art, Displacement and Parrhesia
The Ecology of Everyday Life

The Ecology of Everyday Life
Imagining Connectivity: World Picturing in Contemporary Cultures

Imagining Connectivity: World Picturing in Contemporary Cultures
Arts of the Planet: National Conference, October 27-30, 2011

Arts of the Planet: National Conference, October 27-30, 2011

As part of its program for 2011-2012 on the them of Imaging Planetarity, the Humanities Center will a host the annual meeting of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present
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