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Announcements

Prompting Meaning: Teaching and Learning in the Age of AI, Digital Essay Collection Available Now!

The digital essay collection, Prompting Meaning: Teaching and Learning in the Age of AI, is now available on the WFU Humanities Institute website! This collection features essays by members of the Language, Theory, and Artificial Intelligence Interdisciplinary Faculty Seminar: Erin Branch, Tobias Flattery, Erin Henslee, Ryan D. Shirey, and Carter Smith.

The collection was also just plugged on The American Vandal podcast by host and HI Symposium Keynote Speaker Matt Seybold.

CLICK HERE to read the collection!

Click here to listen to the episode of The American Vandal!

 

 

New Faculty Reception: Thursday, September 24th, 5:00-6:30pm

Humanities Institute New Faculty Reception

Thursday, September 24th
5:00-6:30pm
Reynolda Hall Patio
(Rain Location: Reynolda Hall Green Room)

Join the Humanities Institute and humanities faculty members for an informal celebration of the Fall semester. Enjoy refreshments while learning about how the Humanities Institute can support you and your work, whether or not you teach in a humanities department.

Please RSVP to by Monday, September 21st.

Just Write Continues Friday, September 24th from 2:00-5:00pm

Do you need a change of scenery from your campus and/or home office? Are you looking for a writing community, but not another critique group? Are you looking, in other words, for a space to “just write”? If so, join the Humanities Institute for Just Write. Sessions will meet throughout the Fall 2026 semester on Fridays from 2:00-5:00pm in 301 Reynolda Hall, continuing this Friday, September 24, 2026. The HI provides space, coffee, and light snacks, you do the rest. We hope to see you there!

All sessions will be held in 301 Reynolda Hall, except for Friday, November 6th when it will be held in the ZSR Library, Room 664. 

This fall, we will also be adding a virtual accountability option. If you cannot attend in person but would like to check in via Zoom, you can register here.

 

Dr. Emmaia Gelman: The ADL and the Racial State, Tuesday, September 22nd at 4pm

Dr. Emmaia Gelman will give a talk on her new book, The Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State (University of California Press, 2026), at 4:00pm on Tuesday, September 22nd in the Kulynych Auditorium of the Porter Byrum Welcome Center on the WFU Campus.

This study is the first history of the Anti-Defamation League and its century-long alliance with Western empire.
The ADL is a major US political organization, yet its politics have gone largely unexamined. While the ADL is often portrayed as a defender against antisemitism and racism, its history shows that it is better understood as a proponent of the racial state and US empire. From “correcting” the embarrassing racial difference of immigrant Jews to policing the leftist politics of Black, Arab, and Jewish groups, the ADL has regularly pursued a conservative version of civil rights paired with aggressive anti-communism. Even as it became an authority on white nationalism in the 1970s, the ADL joined with the emerging anti-left, anti-Arab, and pro-Western neoconservative movement.
This history presaged the ADL’s work, from the 1980s to the present, in developing the hate crimes framework as a pro-state policing project, which soon merged with the “War on Terror,” the “antisemitism scare,” and anti-Palestinian racism. The Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State presents the ADL’s history through its conflicts with social justice movements, illuminating the ADL’s outsize role in shaping the ideas about race and rights that have underwritten US empire.
Emmaia Gelman is the founding Director of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. She has taught social and cultural analysis at NYU and social sciences at Sarah Lawrence College. Her writing appears in Jewish Currents, Boston Review, The Forward, and elsewhere. 
The talk is free and open to the public.
For more information, email  or call (336) 758-5501.
The above talk is co-sponsored by several groups on campus, including the WFU Humanities Institute and the National Endowment for the Humanities together.

Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed at these events do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.