Interdisciplinary Faculty Seminars

The Interdisciplinary Faculty Seminars harness the intellectual energies of the Wake Forest humanities and arts faculty to promote and support interdisciplinary collaboration and research that represents the leading edge of humanities scholarship and creates exciting bridges between different disciplines and units within the University. These groups, which meet regularly over the course of a semester or academic year, receive modest project funds and participate in the annual Faculty Seminars Symposium that the Humanities Institute hosts every spring.

Current Seminars

2022-2023

Affective Injustice

Convener: Francisco Gallegos (Philosophy)

Affective injustice is injustice experienced by people in their capacity as affective beings. This domain of inquiry examines how oppression and privilege influence our emotional lives, and how happiness and misery are (intentionally and unintentionally) produced by social institutions.

Environmental Humanities and Environmental Justice

Convener: Alyse Bertenthal (Law School)

Scholars in environmental humanities have much to contribute to the ongoing evaluation of environmental justice, not least of all through response and interventions in popular representations and accounts of ecological crisis and their effects. This seminar will explore the contributions made by environmental humanities to the topic of EJ, focusing on how a humanistic lens shifts environmentalist thought and the consequences of such shift for EJ as both a concept and a movement.

Precarity: History, Theory, Practice

Convener: Lucy Alford (English)

This seminar will place sociopolitical, environmental, literary, and arts-praxis perspectives on precarity in conversation with the aim of gaining more nuanced understanding of this central but highly mobile concept as a condition pervasive in our historical moment. The seminar will think toward a deeper understanding of the meaning and uses of this term across disciplinary frameworks, considering both the historical particularity of precarious environments and human systems, and the ways in which precarity plays out trans-historically (as risk, wager, potentiality, and way-making) in acts of human making, expression, and interpretation.

Past Seminars

Workshop Seminars