We designed a few starter programs to help us get going. We want more, and are open to suggestions and collaborations. Please get in touch if you have ideas or would like to join us in any of these initiatives.
Feast your mind and spirit on a delectable fusion of literature and intellectual nourishment with “Literary Bites,” a Literary Luncheon Series. We will bring together talented writers, scholars, and students for a unique fusion of literary discourse and intellectual community. At these monthly catered lunches, we aim to serve up thought-provoking conversations about past and ongoing projects, showcase Yale’s established and up-and-coming literary talents, and strive to transform our department into a thriving hub for literary creation. Come join us for a literary spread that will leave you savoring every word. To catch upcoming events, please keep an eye out on our encounters page.
At the Forum, we believe that scholarship in the humanities has always been a collective endeavor. The production of books and academic articles is almost always the result of a long process of collaboration and exchange, with many intentions and layers of invisible labor at play. We would like to make this process a bit more visible, and more than that, to encourage the development of new forms of collective research, writing and production. To that effect, we invite proposals for collaborative research projects to be incubated at the Forum. If you have an idea, we might be able to help in various ways: to find collaborators, to find a way to publish your work, to shape the scope of the project realistically, and more. If you are a graduate researcher or undergraduate student, we encourage you to sign up for a group directed study with us. If you are a faculty colleague and you have an idea that exceeds the work of a solo scholar, reach out to us. To learn more, please reach out to us.
Every semester, we will hold a series of workshops on digital and experimental humanities methods and tools. These workshops will be open to all members of the Yale community, and will be taught by members of the Forum, the Yale Graduate Digital Humanities Colloquium, fellow colleagues, and invited guests. We will also be happy to help you organize a workshop on a topic of your choice. Graduate students are welcome to take the series for credit. Get in touch to learn more, and keep an eye out on our events page for upcoming workshops.
Yale hosts amazing scholars and artists from all over the world every year. We want to put our own spin on the genre and make sure that we take advantage of their presence to learn a bit more from them through hands-on work. To that effect, we will organize a series of “talkshops,” where we will invite colleagues to share their work with us, and run a small workshop. A talkshop can take many shapes. We want to explore those that can bring a creative twist to our research and scholarship, or help it speak to broader audiences. Here are some examples we’re dreaming of: a creative writer workshopping a dissertation chapter; a radio journalist running a podcasting workshop; an activist helping us connect our scholarship to a community organization. We welcome your ideas for guests, formats and topics!
At the heart of our Forum is the desire to nurture innovative forms of scholarly collaboration and a true sense of community in the Humanities at Yale—from our undergraduates to our most senior scholars. Our times call on us to open ourselves to various temporal ranges and work modalities, each appropriate to the tasks at hand. We want to make sure that we become better equipped to answer the needs of our communities and fragile planet by practicing the art of the sprint as much as the marathon. To that effect, we will organize one or two collective research sprints each semester. These sprints will be open to all members of the Yale community, and will vary in topic and format—from shared contributions to Wikipedia, to helping out in disaster research, to building bibliographies for each other, to answering pinpointed research questions together. On each occasion, we will invite participants to join us for an afternoon or a day of intensive, shared work, and will provide a space, food, guidance and camaraderie. We will also be happy to help you organize a sprint on a topic of your choice. Get in touch to learn more, and keep an eye out on our events page for upcoming sprints.