Arts and Humanities

The gift from Class of 1976 Brown alumna Shauna Stark, the largest in the Pembroke Center’s history, will establish an endowed directorship and support bold feminist research by scholars from multiple fields of study.

Marcia Chatelain, who graduated from Brown with a master’s and Ph.D. in American civilization, won the 2021 prize for the history category for her book “Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America.”

Graduate student playwrights Nkenna Akunna, Seayoung Yim and Christopher Lindsay were recognized with national awards for writing creative scripts that tackle difficult subjects such as racism, misogyny and “fatphobia.”

A project by two Ph.D. candidates in American studies was awarded $220,000 from the U.S. National Park Service to shed light on the stories of lesser-known Japanese American internment camps from New Mexico to Alaska.

The University’s public art collection will host British artist Rebecca Warren’s huge bronze sculpture, a comment on gender, identity and the role of monuments in public space, for the next five years.

A Carnegie Fellowship will provide support for Françoise Hamlin, an Africana studies and history scholar, to write a book on the risks that young people assumed on the front lines of the civil rights movement.

Rebecca Schneider will draw on the history of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, performance traditions in the Caribbean and the South, and Black feminist thought to understand how performance is linked to oceanic history.

The Brown University Library’s new Center for Library Exploration and Research promises to strengthen scholarly inquiry and support for high-impact research by scholars on campus and beyond.

The Brown Arts Initiative teamed up with members of the student organization Brown Esports and a local artist-producer to create a virtual concert venue replete with whimsical details.

A weeklong Festival of Dance from March 20 to 26 will commemorate the 50th anniversary of dance at the University with studio classes, engaging presentations and premiere performances.

The annual staff art exhibition, curated by the Brown Arts Initiative, is an eye-opening reminder that Brown’s employees are as innovative, thoughtful and bold in their free time as they are at work.

In the face of the pandemic, the Brown University-based National Student Support Accelerator will work with schools and tutoring organizations to expand access to tutoring for socioeconomically disadvantaged students.

With new Mellon Foundation grant, Brown will advance its foray into digital scholarship, starting with 'Furnace and Fugue.'

“African American Political Thought,” co-edited by Brown political scientist Melvin Rogers, reveals the outsize impact many Black thinkers, from Frederick Douglass to Angela Davis, have had on American society.

Brown University, Williams College and the Mystic Seaport Museum scholars will use maritime history as a basis for studying the relationship between European colonization, dispossession of Native American land and racial slavery.

To celebrate the topping-off of its future hub for performing arts scholarship, University leaders joined construction workers and key project partners for a live-streamed virtual ceremony complete with on-site drone footage.

A virtual fete on Tuesday, Dec. 15, will pay tribute to Karen Allen Baxter, who has served as senior managing director of Brown’s Rites and Reason Theatre since 1988.

The University is the newest member of a nationwide alliance dedicated to preserving and advancing the scholarly and institutional library collections of historically Black colleges and universities.

As artistic director, Hoffman will curate arts programming, including work by students, faculty and external artists and organizations, building the visibility and quality of arts programming at the University.

A Sawyer Seminar grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation will fund a series of Brown University-based events and community partnerships focused on migration from and within Latin America and the Caribbean.

Students in the remote course Indigenous Art, Issues and Concepts, taught by visiting instructor Marina Tyquiengco, will cap off the fall semester by creating their own Indigenous art exhibitions.

Renée Ater, who has conducted pathbreaking research at the intersection of race, public art and national identity, will teach courses and create a born-digital scholarly publication as a visiting associate professor of Africana studies at Brown.

The monthly panel discussion series, happening throughout the 2020-21 academic year, will confront and examine the role that racism plays in American public health, democracy, punishment and more.

In the midst of the first global pandemic of the digital age, historians and archivists, both at Brown and across the globe, have launched countless efforts to record history in the making.

Through digital marketplaces, murals and storytelling, the Brown-RISD dual degree student and El Paso, Texas, native seeks to celebrate the unique character of the Southwest.

The Brown-RISD dual degree student is pursuing several summer projects that use cutting-edge technology to connect people to the natural world and to each other.

“Trouble of the World,” by visiting faculty member Zach Sell of Brown University, demonstrates that American slavery transformed labor and production practices around the world, even in places where slavery was abolished.

Students in an American studies course at Brown worked with the Lippitt House Museum to create a digital exhibition chronicling the history of women’s suffrage and voting rights in Rhode Island and beyond.

“The Tight Rope,” co-hosted by two prominent scholars at Brown and Harvard, respectively, offers in-depth yet accessible conversations about race, social justice and African American arts and culture.

“Plastic Orchestra,” composed by Class of 2020 graduate Sofia Frohna, celebrates old music traditions while embracing seldom-heard instruments, from melodicas to boomwhackers.

Mira Nikolova, a native of Bulgaria and a doctoral candidate in Slavic studies, plans to draw parallels between Ph.D. students and saguaro cacti in her Virtual Degree Conferral ceremony address on Sunday, May 24.

An essay by Anthony Bogues, director of the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice at Brown, anchors a scholarly discussion in the United Nations’ 30th-anniversary Human Development Report.

Benjamin Moser, a Class of 1998 graduate, won a 2020 Pulitzer Prize for the authorized biography “Sontag: Her Life and Work" — and a team led in part by Brown alumnus Ira Glass captured the first ever prize for audio reporting.

Victoria Almansa-Villatoro, a Ph.D. student in Egyptology, worked with learning designers at Brown to create an interactive online course about the pyramids, kings and societies of the third millennium B.C.

A new virtual arts hub, BAI at Home, details live-streamed concerts, online exhibitions and creative challenges for students, faculty, staff and members of the greater community.

Lynne Joyrich, a professor of modern culture and media at Brown, discussed how television is helping to steer the narrative and helping people to cope during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Brown Arts Initiative’s Community Development Grants will fund the creation of new art for the 2020-21 season and help to support local artists who have been impacted by the pandemic.

A $245,000 award from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation will allow Itohan Osayimwese, an architectural and urban historian at Brown, to pursue additional studies in historical archaeology.

Three graduate students in archaeology worked with the Historic Cemetery Advisory Commission in Newport, Rhode Island, to create an interactive map of God’s Little Acre, one of the oldest African and African American burial grounds in the country.

“The Supermarket of Images,” an exhibition on view at the Jeu de Paume through June 2020, explores how images shape and change people’s lives.

With the papers of Hortense J. Spillers arriving at Brown last fall, the Pembroke Center Archives has deepened its archive of black feminist theory.

Bashir, director of the Center for Middle East Studies at Brown, will discuss the cultural pervasiveness of poetry in Iran, Central Asia and South Asia.

This spring, events presented by the Brown Arts Initiative and other campus arts entities give students and curious community members the chance to see how creators in every field execute their ideas.

The two 19th-century buildings are now unified by two modern glass bridges and a light-filled “loggia,” uniting faculty, staff and students from Brown’s Department of History.

Thalia Field, the Brown Arts Initiative’s new faculty director and a professor of creative writing at the University, discussed her vision for the future of the arts at Brown.

The film series, led by the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs and by family, friends and classmates of the late Brown alumnus, aims to underscore the importance of documentaries in understanding and confronting challenging social issues.

A four-year Mellon Foundation grant will enable the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity and academic centers at three fellow institutions to expand research and teaching opportunities on race and ethnicity.

Postdoctoral researcher Rui Gomes Coelho plans to excavate a trail once trod by WW-II refugees — now a migration route for thousands who are fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa.

In “Boatbuilding: Design, Making and Culture,” at once a humanities seminar and a hands-on engineering lesson, students from concentrations across the University built and launched a wooden boat.

On the 400th anniversary of the start of slave trade in the British American colonies, students and faculty at Brown’s Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice are engaging in research for a PBS miniseries directed by renowned documentarian Stanley Nelson, hosting a two-day symposium on the lasting effects of slavery and more.