Mandel Center for the Humanities

September 8, 2025

4pm - 5:30pm in the Mandel Atrium

Join us to celebrate new books by faculty and staff in the Division of Creative Arts & Humanities. We will hold short book talks by each author and have a raffle of the new books. 

September 15, 2025

4pm - 5:30pm in Mandel 303 

Focusing on the bureaucracy of medical ethics in Israel, this talk explores the structures that mediate—and sometimes silence—the potential crisis emerging when the rationale of healthcare is confronted with security considerations. At its edge, the question thus becomes: How may medical ethics, as a set of institutions and procedures, limit, shape, mitigate, or perhaps even facilitate torture? Some of these bureaucratic structures have long colonial legacies, others emerge from the collapse of public systems that ensues from neoliberal policies; some are organized around racial divides, others are more universal in their deployment; but all end up replicating one pattern: they all ultimately dissolve into nothingness. My inquiry began with a hypothesis that cases of tortured people brought to public hospitals, in which physicians are often called to violate their code of ethics, would bring into operation the robust mechanisms of ethics that organize the medical field. Instead, I found an absence: an absence of procedures, an absence of implementing procedures, or an absence of these procedures’ ability to address the question of torture. In my talk, I will analyze this absence as part of larger political structures that have rendered ethics a facilitator of national violence rather than a mechanism for its restraint.

September 25, 2025

1:20pm - 2:10pm in Mandel 303

Tehila Hakimi is a Jewish Book Council Award winner, a 2018 Fulbright International Writing Program Fellowship participant, and the winner of the 2018 Levi Eshkol Memorial Prime Minister’s Prize for Hebrew Writers. Hakimi’s short prose and poems have been published in translation in Asymptote, World Literature Today, and The Poetry Review.

Her works include Tomorrow We Will Work (Poetry, 2014, Tangier Publishing), In the Water (Graphic Novella, 2016), Company (Prose, 2018, Resling Publishing), Motherland (Novella, 2023, Pardes Publishing & Van Leer Institute), Hunting in America (Novel, 2023, Ahuzat Bayit Publishing), and Mother X (Poetry, 2024, Locus Publishing).

Join us for a reading with Tehila Hakimi from her novel Hunting in America (2025, Penguin Random House, translated by Joanna Chen).

September 29, 2025

12pm - 1pm in Mandel 303

Join us to launch our new Humanities & Economics series with Dr. Geoff Clarke (Brandeis Economics).

Many people accept that race has affected the historical contours of American finance, but exactly how so is often left to experts to determine. In this panel, we ask Dr. Geoff Clarke how history, politics and race theory have affected the American economic landscape. The talk will draw on Dr. Clarke's work on the economic and social impact of Black-owned banks from 1900 - 1930.  

October 6, 2025

1:30pm - 3:00pm in Mandel 303

Join us for a book talk on Portraits In a Nutshell, about a collection of Coquilla Nut snuff boxes from the collection of David Badger. These boxes represent an art form that was brought to Brazil from West Africa. We don't know much about their history, who made them or why. Some of them have South American flora and fauna on them, while others have carvings of George Washington, Napoleon and US abolitionists. The Brandeis University Press is one of the first to publish on a collection of these boxes.  

The event will feature a talk by Prof. Aida Wong (Brandeis) on the global culture of snuff, and then a panel with book editor Donna Sanzone, collector David Badger and Professor Gwendolyn Dubois Shaw (UPenn).  

October 20, 2025

2:30pm - 3:50pm in Mandel 303

In this presentation, I develop an interdisciplinary approach to the concept of witnessing with which to analyze the work of memory activists. This approach offers a nuanced understanding of witnessing as a multifaceted, plural encounter, with witnesses acting as agents who can share their experiences from various perspectives, ranging from experts to laypersons. My analysis is grounded in case studies of two Berlin-based migrant groups addressing national, transnational, and international issues: International Women* Space (IWS) and Anu’s Middle East Union (Anu/MEU).

I examine virtual and in-person events organized by these groups between 2020 and 2024, their publications, and media reports from German and international sources. I argue that these memory activists establish a politics of solidarity through discourse-based interventions, addressing issues such as racism, inequality, and (in)visibility. They create an agentive gaze, allowing themselves and others to observe society and their positions as non-citizens, migrants and refugees within it. I argue that the public initiatives of these groups create witnessing platforms from which to observe policies and their implications, fostering mutual recognition and inviting various witnesses. This analysis is significant for understanding how non-citizen memory activists enact a space of appearance, in which they establish social presence, cultivate subjectivity and imagine alternative futures.

October 23, 2025

Time TBD - Mandel 303

Please join Professor Andie Berry (Theater), Professor Daniel Breen (Legal Studies) and Professor Roz Kabhrel (Legal Studies) for a look at the intersection of law and performance. Topics include courtroom drama, the staging of a persuasive argument, the law in Shakespeare, and more.  

October 27, 2025

4:00pm - 5:30pm in the Mandel Atrium 

Panel Celebrating Muna Güvenç’s Book The City Is Ours: Spaces of Political Mobilization and Imaginaries of Nationhood in Turkey (Cornell University Press, 2024)

Participants: Sarah Mayorga (Brandeis), Gabriel A. Arboleda (Amherst College), Muna Güvenç (Brandeis)
Moderator: Rachel McKane (Brandeis)

11:10 - 12:30pm in Tbd 

 Sub-Saharan Africa is often stereotyped as being largely illiterate because of the legacy of the Eurocentric tradition that equates literacy with the ability to read and write only in European languages and the Roman alphabet. However, millions of Africans have been reading and writing various types of religious and non-religious texts in local languages, using enriched forms of the Arabic script known as Ajami. In this talk, I show what scholars and students in the humanities and social sciences can gain by studying African Ajami manuscripts and how new insights from these primary sources will lead to revisions in our understanding of various aspects of pre- colonial, colonial, and post-colonial Africa.

This event is a part of the series - Global Humanities Now: Knowledge Across Worlds

 Can the Humanities truly claim to address the human condition if they are constructed largely around the lives and concerns of only a fraction of the world’s population? The series Global Humanities Now responds to the need to democratize the scope and expand the classical Humanities while retaining regional distinctions. As presently constituted, the Humanities are grounded in the philosophies, archives, cultures, knowledges, experiences, and aesthetics of mainly Western civilization—and in their assimilation of other cultures into a Western worldview. To rehumanize and globalize the Humanities is therefore to expand the field, bringing into focus the under-accounted peoples and knowledge systems of the world. It is to center and welcome, in their fullness, the archives, philosophies, cultures, and experiences of non-Western peoples into Humanities research, pedagogy, and practice. Speakers in this series will present diverse pathways toward rehumanizing the Humanities and making them a truly global endeavor.

November 17, 2025

2:30pm - 3:50pm in Tbd 

Panel Celebrating Muna Güvenç’s Book The City Is Ours: Spaces of Political Mobilization and Imaginaries of Nationhood in Turkey (Cornell University Press, 2024)

Participants: Lawrence Vale (MIT), Dan Breen (Brandeis), Muna Güvenç (Brandeis)
Moderator: Peter Kalb (Brandeis)

November 24, 2025

2:30pm to 3:50pm in Tbd

This presentation discusses feminist and humanities-centered approaches to repair
work through remembrance and community archiving for social justice.  It analyzes co-
creation and co-curation as a methodological approach that can involve students in
practices of witnessing that resist indifference, and ensure instead that they open the
possibility of  creating knowledge in solidarity with care and ethical engagement with
African women refugees and immigrants. By focusing on the lived experiences of
ordinary mothers, this presentation seeks to highlight the nuanced ways in which
memory operates as a means of resistance in the daily lives of African women migrants.

This event is a part of the series - Global Humanities Now: Knowledge Across Worlds

 Can the Humanities truly claim to address the human condition if they are constructed largely around the lives and concerns of only a fraction of the world’s population? The series Global Humanities Now responds to the need to democratize the scope and expand the classical Humanities while retaining regional distinctions. As presently constituted, the Humanities are grounded in the philosophies, archives, cultures, knowledges, experiences, and aesthetics of mainly Western civilization—and in their assimilation of other cultures into a Western worldview. To rehumanize and globalize the Humanities is therefore to expand the field, bringing into focus the under-accounted peoples and knowledge systems of the world. It is to center and welcome, in their fullness, the archives, philosophies, cultures, and experiences of non-Western peoples into Humanities research, pedagogy, and practice. Speakers in this series will present diverse pathways toward rehumanizing the Humanities and making them a truly global endeavor

January 15, 2025

Mandel 303 (12pm-1:20pm)

An event with author Nicholas Nugent. 

From book description:  We may think of “globalism” as a recent development but its origins date back to the fifteenth century and beyond, when seafarers pioneered routes across the oceans with the objectives of exploration, trade, and profit.
 
These voyages only became possible after certain technical innovations—improvements in ship design, compasses, and mapping—enabled navigation across unprecedented distances. The mariners’ embarkation points were the vibrant ports of the West—Venice, Amsterdam, Lisbon—and their destinations the exotic ports of the East—Malacca, Goa, Bombay—where they tracked down the elusive spices, so much in demand by Western palates.

January 28, 2025

Mandel 303 (12-1pm)

Race & Health with Professor Wangui Muigai (AAAS, History) and Professor Yesmar Oyarzun (Anthropology)

February 3, 2025

Usdan International Lounge (4:00pm-5:30pm)

A Conversation with Shane Burley and Ben Lorber, Moderated by Sarah Mayorga

"Safety through solidarity means we cannot truly end antisemitism by building higher walls, fortifying nation-states, hiring more police or militarized security at synagogues, or going along with politics that scapegoat activists of color and divide communities. It means we must fight antisemitism at its root by building powerful mass movements to transform society’s underlying inequality, exploitation, and alienation....It means we must recognize the intersectional links between antisemitism and capitalism, anti-Blackness, anti-LGBTQ bigotry, and other structures of oppression, and build relationships of co-resistance between Jews and other marginalized groups." --From Safety through Solidarity by Shane Burley and Ben Lorber

Co-sponsored by the Department of Anthropology, the Education Program, the Legal Studies Program, the Department of Sociology, the Department of Journalism, the Department of Women's and Gender Studies, and the Dean of Arts and Sciences

February 10, 2025

Mandel 303 (12-1:30pm)

A global outlook is important to our individual and collective well-being, and multilingualism is crucial for developing such an outlook. With this idea as our starting point we will explore how multilingualism can inform our sense of identity, strengthen our civic and community spaces,  clarify shared and universal value, and of course influence our educational institutions to prepare students for a more interconnected world. 

Speakers: Kelly Linehan (Waltham Public Library), Robin Feuer Miller (GRALL), Chandler Rosenberger (International & Global Studies), John Tessitore (National Commission on Language Learning of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences). 

February 24, 2025

Mandel Atrium (4:00pm-5:30pm)

The aim is to explore the complex and often contradictory experience of being Afro-descendant in Paris. While the city is celebrated globally as a symbol of enlightenment, culture, and opportunity, and a place of refuge, it also embodies systemic inequities, colonial legacies, and racial discrimination that cast a shadow over its bright reputation.

Through this lens, the theme examines Paris as a space of duality—where Afro-descendant communities contribute vibrantly to its identity but also face exclusion, stereotypes, and socio-economic challenges. It reflects on how the city’s history, policies, and culture intersect with race and power, and rethinks Paris as both a beacon of light and a site of struggle for equity and recognition.

February 25, 2025

Mandel 303 (4:00pm-5:30pm)

This lecture challenges the dominant narrative of universalism grounded in the Enlightenment philosophy and, often heralded as a foundation of equality and justice, by interrogating its history and applications. While universalism claims to transcend differences and promote equality, it has frequently been weaponized to impose a singular, Eurocentric perspective that erases cultural diversity and reinforces systemic racism.

It is a proposal for a vision of “grounded universality,” one that respects pluralism, centers historically excluded voices, and reimagines universalism as a framework rooted in equity, inclusion, and shared humanity rather than domination.

February 26, 2025

Mandel 303 (12:00pm-1:30pm)

This conference addresses how universalist ideals are weaponized to control and assimilate non-white bodies, particularly those of Muslim and non-white women. Framed as upholding neutrality and equality, these policies and social norms often serve to enforce conformity to white standards while marginalizing diverse identities.

The discussion delves into examples such as bans on the hijab, which claim to liberate women while denying them agency, and the imposition of beauty norms, that devalue cultural expressions. These practices are examined as tools of surveillance and assimilation, where bodies are policed to fit a narrow definition of “acceptable” citizenship under the guise of universalism.

March 4, 2025

Mandel 303 (11:30 a.m.)

How will America's colleges and universities adapt to remarkable technological, economic, and demographic change? Join us for a discussion of Arthur Levine's The Great Upheaval as we explore how higher education is evolving in response to these shifts.

A light deli lunch will be included.

RSVP via Google Forms.

March 6, 2025

Mandel 303 (12pm - 1pm)

Graduate Talks from Anik Chartrand (English) and Alexandra Szabo (History). Moderated by Sabine von Mering (CGES, GRALL). 

March 12, 2025

Mandel 303 (12:15pm-1:15pm)

Time Travel with Professor Katie Elliott (Philosophy) and Professor John Plotz (English)

Why did it take until a century ago for people to dream up the idea of time-travel, and another fifty years for the idea of changing your own past to occur to people? And why has it become an essentially omnipresent idea ever since?

Suppose your parents met in 1980. If you traveled back in time to 1980, could you help facilitate their meeting? (Yes). Could you prevent their meeting? (No.) What explains the asymmetry?

Suppose you knew everything that was going to happen in advance. What would be the point of doing anything? What would motivate you to act? What kinds of reasons would make you do one thing rather than another? Could you experience yourself as an agent if you had a certain kind of foreknowledge? If God knows all that will ever be, how can God experience themselves as an agent?

Learn the answers to these questions and more!

March 13, 2025

Mandel 303 (11:30am)

You’re invited to the Nobel Laureate Reading Group! Join us in discussing Nobel Prize-Winning Author Han Kang’s The Vegetarian. Light lunch will be provided.

RSVP HERE via Google Forms.

March 20, 2025

 Mandel Atrium (5:30pm - 6:45pm)

In celebration of James Baldwin's centenary, the Mandel Center will host a collective reading of his works. Bring your favorite passages from Baldwin to share with the group!

March 26, 2025

  Mandel Reading Room 303 (4:o0pm-5:30pm)

A Conversation with Maurice Ebileeni and Ayelet Ben-Yishai

In the fall of 2022, Ayelet Ben Yishai and Maurice Ebileeni – both faculty members in the English department at the University of Haifa – co-authored an op-ed. While in agreement on much of its content, they faced an unforeseen difficulty in forging an authorial “we” to speak in one voice on equal terms. Ben-Yishai, a Jewish Israeli, and Ebileeni, a Palestinian and a citizen of Israel, have since engaged in a candid (and mostly difficult) dialogue, writing to and with each other, testing out the possibilities for a common existence for themselves as colleagues and friends, and for Israelis and Palestinians in general – “from the river to the sea.” The dialogue is ongoing but has, since last year, taken on a new urgency and assumed the form of a work-in-progress. This event invites the audience to join in, exploring questions of identity, culture, complicity, Zionism, the occupation, Palestinian displacement, history, the present, and the future.

April 1, 2025

Mandel 303 (1:00pm-2:00pm)

Sahid Mondal (English) and Lianne Gallant (History) moderated by Brian Horton (Anthropology, AAAS)