Seminars
Seminars at the Robert Penn Warren Center invite faculty and graduate students to engage in rich conversations and innovative scholarship with colleagues from a wide range of disciplines.
- View the RPW events calendar for the full seminar schedule.
- View RPW’s seminar history.
- We will invite proposals for the 2025-2026 academic year in March 2025.
2024-2025 Seminar Series
Co-directors: Alexis Finet (French and Italian) and Cameron Pattison (Philosophy)
AI and the Human Seminar aims to explore the philosophical implications of artificial intelligence (AI) on our understanding of intelligence and the human condition, focusing on redefining AI's impact on the humanities. It will foster interdisciplinary dialogue among faculty, graduate students, and visiting scholars, addressing questions about AI's challenge to traditional intelligence, ethical considerations, and the humanities' role in AI discourse. The seminar, held monthly, will offer hands-on experience with cutting-edge tools and will provide access to Vanderbilt’s Amplify platform featuring GPT-4, Claude-3, Mistral, and more. Sessions will alternate between in-depth reading discussions and presentations by leading experts in AI ethics. Participation from diverse academic departments and community leaders is strongly encouraged.This seminar seeks to advance interdisciplinary research and enhance understanding of AI's impact on research and teaching while fostering a community of scholars dedicated to examining the ethical and philosophical dimensions of AI. For upcoming speakers, resources, and more information, visit our website.
Co-directors: Brandon Byrd (History) and Anthony Reed (English)
The Black Worlds and World-Making Seminar is about Black people and the modern world. It attends to the historical and current thought and subjective experiences of the people who have claimed Blackness as a political, social, and cultural identity. It is about Black world-making too. Once a month, our meetings will convene scholars from Vanderbilt and beyond who will share new and in-progress research on topics such as interrelated struggles for racial justice, practices of resistance, and dreams of freedom across Africa and its Diaspora. Working across disciplinary and activist modes of scholarship, these meetings will establish a common ground on which students and scholars from a variety of backgrounds can collaborate for the mutual purposes of study and struggle. Co-sponsored by the Racial Justice Grand Challenge Initiative.
Co-directors: Matt Worsnick (History of Art and Architecture) and Ben Sawyer (History, MTSU)
East Europe and Eurasia: Critical Engagements invites scholars from across disciplinary and institutional lines to join a community that promises to enrich the scholarship of the presenter as well as those in attendance. The seminar explores a range of humanistic topics concerning the region of Russia, Eastern Europe, and former Soviet Empire, including distinct East European and Eurasian frameworks of culture; the complexities of empire (both past and present); questions of religion, law, and political authority; socialism and post-socialism; minority rights and mass violence; and Russia’s place in defining scholarly conversations and methods of inquiry. A typical meeting consists of an open discussion of a pre-circulated work-in-progress approached with the dual aims of providing constructive feedback and provoking discussion and collegial debate. The author, in attendance, briefly contextualizes the piece and responds to inquiries and critiques. By hosting speakers and participants from multiple disciplines and academic institutions, this seminar brings multiple voices and perspectives to the table in an inclusive scholarly community that explores original questions and fosters new and innovative approaches to research.
Co-directors: Jennifer Fay (Cinema & Media Arts/English), Huan He (English), and Sasha Crawford-Holland (Cinema & Media Arts/Communication Studies)
The Film Theory and Visual Culture Seminar fosters dialogue among faculty and graduate students interested in film, visual culture, literature and media studies, as well as in philosophies of perception, aesthetics and critical theory, the politics of technology, and the history of vision. Each semester we host scholars, media-makers, and artists from leading film and media programs (and adjacent fields), as well as scholars from our own Vanderbilt community. See our line-up of speakers below and please join us for the conversation! To see a list of previous speakers, please click here. For more information about upcoming programming, click here.
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Co-directors: Susan Dine (Art History) and Jana Harper (Art)
The Indigenous Studies Seminar provides an opportunity for sharing research on critical Indigenous and Native American issues. The seminar is an interdisciplinary space where faculty, staff, post and doctoral students come together to dialog, discuss works-in-progress, share networks, and build community. The seminar supports relationship-building both within and outside the University and hosts discussions with both local and national Indigenous Scholars and Knowledge Keepers.
Co-directors: Elizabeth Meadows (Assoc. Dir., RPW Center/English) and Chris Vanags (Program Director, Peabody College)
The Nashville Bestiary Project brings together Vanderbilt and Nashville communities to unearth wild and natural elements persisting in urban settings. Over the course of the year, we will develop a range of practices and activities that leverage the humanities, arts, and environmental sciences to explain and mitigate the impact of climate change in urban spaces. We will work with photographers to capture natural elements within urban streetscapes; learn from sound engineers to record daily cycles of birdsong; keep field notebooks that use narrative, sketches, and maps to describe the world around us; and create mixed-media representations of landscapes’ transformations over time.
Co-directors: Julia Phillips Cohen (Jewish Studies) and Samuel Dolbee (History)
The Ottoman History Workshop explores the dynamism of the Ottoman world and its impact beyond the empire’s borders and into the present in southeast Europe, southwest Asia, north Africa, and beyond. To promote collaboration, the seminar partners with various units across campus and focuses on works-in-progress. Seminar topics in the past have included American oil interests in the empire, the political ecology of charcoal and forests in Ottoman Kurdistan, science and sexology, and the question of race and the British Mandate in Iraq.
Co-directors: Adeana McNicholl (Religious Studies), Akshya Saxena (English), and Anand Vivek Taneja (Religious Studies)
The Remaking South Asia Seminar examines the complex histories of bordering, migration, and religion that have shaped South Asia as a political region and scholarly area. This year, in line with RPW’s theme of “Emerging Technologies and the Human Experience,” we aim to foster discussions on the impacts of changing technologies and their concomitant effects on the environment and labor relations, caste hierarchies, and other intersectional forms of identity in South Asia. Understanding “technologies” capaciously, we consider the emergence of new technologies of labor in South Asia from the colonial period to the present day, their impact on human experience, and how South Asians have responded to the social impacts of technological innovations. While low-caste and non-Hindu laborers are particularly vulnerable to technological and environmental change, this year’s visiting speakers demonstrate the range of creativity these communities utilize in response to industrialization.
Co-directors: Elizabeth Covington (GSS/English), Kristin Rose (GSS), Stacy Clifford Simplican (GSS/Political Science), and Danyelle Valentine (GSS/American Studies)
Working across disciplinary boundaries in a dynamic and inclusive scholarly community, the Rights and Resistance Seminar addresses significant cultural issues, politics, and scholarship that describe the current state and consider the future of human rights in the United States. The seminar will use both scholarly and popular texts as a jumping-off point to discuss human rights and resistance to power structures related to race, gender, class, sexuality, and ability.
Co-directors: Eric Moses Gurevitch (Asian Studies), Tasha Rijke-Epstein (History), and Laura Stark (Medicine, Healthy, and Society)
Science and Technology Studies is an multidisciplinary seminar focused on science, power, and justice. Through collective reading, conversations, and events, this seminar series will bring together faculty and students from across the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences to explore the processes and power structures through which knowledge is collectively crafted, as well as the impacts and erasures of collective knowledge. The premise of the seminar is that critical humanistic perspectives are needed now more than ever to shed light on the possibilities and limits of science and technology for addressing profound global challenges—with the benefit of insights from a range of geographic locations, time frames, and political positionalities.
Co-directors: Jay Clayton (English/CMA) and Scott J. Juengel (English)
The Novel Seminar brings together the Vanderbilt community and visiting scholars to engage with groundbreaking scholarship on the history, theory, and politics of the novel form, from its early modern provenance to its contemporary persistence in a hyper-mediated public sphere. Our sessions explore matters of fictional world-building and narrative form as they intersect with pressing questions in multiple fields of inquiry, from climate change to racial capitalism, sexual politics to social justice. While largely focused on the Anglophone world, the seminar welcomes scholars working in a range of national literatures and disciplines to share work and join the discussions.
Co-Directors: Teresa Goddu (English), Eric Gurevitch (Asian Studies), Anna Hill (English), and Matthew Plishka (Latin American Studies)
Members of the Environmental Humanities Seminar engage in lively interdisciplinary discussions about how people think about, represent, interact with, and change/are changed by their environments. Our invited speakers, works-in-progress talks, excursions, films, and reading groups provide a forum to discuss the history and culture of ecological sensibility, environmental management, climate change, and environmental justice, among other topics. We invite those interested in the environmental humanities to bring their interests, expertise, curiosity, and questions to our community.
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Co-Directors: Eddie Wright-Rios (History), Lara Lookabaugh (Gender & Sexuality Studies), Helen Makhdoumian (English), Lidiana de Moraes (Latin American Studies), Elvira Aballi Morell (Spanish & Portuguese), and Jesús Ruiz (American Studies)
Members of the Global Humanities Seminar center their work on the humanistic study of the implications of global movements of people, goods, and ideas. Our scholarly programming particularly focuses on dislocation, belonging, and citizenship issues. Although we ground our intellectual pursuits within disciplinary leanings – such as History, Anthropology, Modern Languages & Literatures, and Cultural Studies – the implications of our seminar are deeply transdisciplinary and take a bottom-up approach to examine matters of race, ethnicity, migration, gender & sexuality, and other pursuits.
Co-Directors: Letizia Modena (Italian), Peter Chesney (History of Art and Architecture), Lee Ann Custer (History of Art and Architecture), Jonathan Karp (American Studies), Ana Luiza Morais Soares (Anthropology), and Anna Tybinko (Spanish and Portuguese)
The Urban Humanities Seminar offers a forum for interdisciplinary dialogue on and collaborative approaches to the study of the past, present, and future of cities and their inhabitants, viewed through the lens of spatial justice. Situated at the intersection of humanities, urban planning and design, and civic engagement, our discussions consider how the stories that are told about cities reveal spatial relations and social inequities—and how, by examining the cultural, economic, political, gendered, and racialized memories embedded in these stories, we might collectively work toward a more just future. We invite those interested in the interplay between people and the urban environment to share ideas and projects, especially as they concern: the ability of arts and literature to reflect and shape affective and cognitive relationships to the urban environment; identity and the experience of place; issues of inclusion and exclusion in cities as they pertain to in/visibility, belonging, livability, mobility, migration and movement, place attachment and place making.
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