Annual Themes

Each year, the Robert Penn Warren Center selects a theme around which it centers its core programming and fellows programs. The theme for the 2022-23 academic year is The Place of Memory.

With equal emphasis on “place” and “memory,” we invited graduate studies from across the humanities you to create, research, and (re)think what it means to navigate remembering and forgetting in our post-COVID, algorithmic world.

Where does memory live in the body and how is it communicated through our actions in the world?
How do places—geographical, corporeal, conceptual—inform memory?
How do memory and place(s)—individual, collective, or historical—influence and shape each other?
How do we memorialize so as to preserve, do justice, heal, and move forward? And when is it necessary to forget?

Recent themes

2022-2023: Mending and Transforming
2021-2022: Environments
2020-2021: Imagining Cities
2019-2020: Borders and Belonging
2018-2019: The World of Print(s)
2017-2018: Telling Stories
2016-2017: Working for Equality and Justice
2015-2016: When the Fringe Dwarfs the Center
2014-2015: Public Scholarship in the Humanities
2013-2014: Diagnosis in Context: Culture, Politics, and the Construction of Meaning
2012-2013: Age of Emancipation: Black Freedom in the Atlantic World