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A student browsing through books in the Humanities Center.

Fostering multidisciplinary perspectives

Professor Russell Peck with a student.

Supporting collaboration

A pile of Post family letters and photographs.

Exploring artifacts of the human experience

Tanya Bakhmetyeva

Announcement

Associate Director Named

On January 1, we welcomed Tanya Bakhmetyeva as Associate Director of the Humanities Center. Bakhmetyeva will work closely with the Director to set Center priorities, develop funding requests, and co-edit the “Humanities in the World” series we launched earlier this year with the University of Rochester Press.

Bakhmetyeva is Professor of Instruction in the Department of History and is also currently the Associate Academic Director of the Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies, a position she will dually hold through the Spring semester of 2024. Bakhmetyeva is the author of Mother of the Church: Sophia Svechina and the Politics of Catholicism in 19th Century Russia and France (Northern Illinois University Press, 2016), which won her the Harry C. Koenig Book Award from the American Catholic Association. Her next book, The Politburo goes Hunting: Masculinity, Nature and Power among the Soviet Political Elite is under contract from Northern Illinois University Press, now an imprint of Cornell University Press.

What is the Humanities Center?

As scholars in the humanities and humanistic social sciences at the University of Rochester, we examine human culture in its myriad forms: literature, language, media, philosophy, religion, history, anthropology, visual and performing arts, and much more. We are committed to critical thinking, reasoned discourse, inclusiveness, civility, empathy, and compassion—values that lie at the center of humanistic inquiry and that are essential for a thriving democratic citizenry. The Humanities Center, located in Rush Rhees Library, is our home base for interdisciplinary exchange and collaboration. We offer programs for faculty, students, and the public. To become an affiliate of the Center and receive emails about our events, contact humanities@rochester.edu.

Upcoming Events

News & Announcements

December 21, 2024

2 Open Letter nominations for NBCC prize

Two books, edited and published by Open Letter, the nonprofit, literary translation press at the , have made it onto the longlist for the 2024 Barrios Book in Translation Prize. The honor is awarded annually by the National Book Critics Circle.

December 20, 2024

2024 Choice Outstanding Academic Title

Congratulations to Ani & Mark Gabrellian Director of the Humanities Center, Peter H. Christensen, whose book Prior Art: Patents and the Nature of Invention in Architecture was selected as a 2024 Choice Outstanding Academic Title.

November 20, 2024

Architecture’s Role in Honoring the Lives That Inhabit It

Click here to read more about this collaboration with the Stanford Humanities Center.

October 21, 2024

Bogliasco Foundation recognizes UR faculty Jennifer Grotz

The Van Cleef & Arpels Fellowships in Choreography and Poetry sponsors annual Fellowships for a choreographer and a poet of any nationality. Jennifer Grotz is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Still Falling. Everything I Don't Know, the selected poems of Jerzy Ficowski, co-translated from the Polish with Piotr Sommer received the PEN Award for Best Book of Poetry. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Nation, The New Republic, New York Review of Books, Ploughshares, New England Review, and in five volumes of the Best American Poetry anthology.

October 2, 2024

On Thinning Ice

‘ICE HUMANITIES’: In a sense, glaciers have become a new endangered species. For a pair of University of Rochester historians, including Interim Humanities Center Director Tanya Bakhmetyeva, collecting and preserving human history—and the history of glacial science—takes on new urgency in the face of rapid climate change.

May 14, 2024

Anna Rosensweig Receives President’s Ferrari Humanities Research Award

Anna Rosensweig, an associate professor of French and the director of the Graduate Program in Visual and Cultural Studies, has been named the latest recipient of the President's Ferrari Humanities Research Award.

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Research Spotlight

Research at Rochester: Windows of opportunity? SMASH the CRASH and bird collision prevention

“Smash the Crash,” a research initiative made up of a team of dedicated student volunteers and faculty, hopes to accurately document these collisions and recommend solutions for preventing bird-window collisions on campus. The study is led by anthropologist Dr. Richard Fadok, a postdoctoral fellow in the Humanities Center.

The cover of the annual report.

Annual Report

2023-2024 Annual Report Now Available

We are proud to feature the highlights and accomplishments of the Humanities Center in our new annual report.

View the Report

The Humanities Center

Fostering Interdisciplinary Collaboration

In the Humanities Center, faculty, fellows, students, affiliates, and the public gather to collaborate and create community. Seminars, workshops, lectures, digital projects and other forms of humanistic inquiry animate our beautiful new space in Rush Rhees Library. 

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24departments and programs

With majors and degree programs that incorporate dozens of disciplines.

115humanities clusters

Comprised of hundreds of courses based in the School of Arts and Sciences.

Support the Center

Rochester is uniquely positioned to pursue research that spans the arts and humanities. If you would like more information about the humanities at Rochester or the Central New York Humanities Corridor, please contact us.

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We welcome all inquires about any of the Humanities Center programs and activities.
Contact us for more information.