Video / Audio  Public Humanities

Emily Hainze is a doctoral candidate in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where she writes and teaches about 19th- and 20th-century American literature. Her dissertation focuses on women’s incarceration in the United States, exploring how questions of narrative and genre have been shaped by the conceptualization of women’s crime from the late 19th century onward. As a Public Humanities Fellow at the Heyman Center, Emily will work to develop an online repository for digitized archival records of women and imprisonment, with an eye towards classroom use.

Mary Grace Albanese is a doctoral candidate in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Her dissertation centers on the role of the Haitian Revolution in early 19th-century French-U.S. literary exchange. Her other research interests include translation theory, the transatlantic Gothic, and the legal history of slavery. She is also a translator between French and English, with multiple areas of specialization including law, medicine, and education. As a Public Humanities Fellow, Mary Grace will create a forum for the collection, translation, and publication of Haitian history as told by Haitians themselves. Through a trans-lingual oral history initiative, the project aims to preserve and transmit contemporary Haitian narratives.

An evening of justice poetry featuring Claudia Rankine, Dawn Lundy Martin, and Messiah Ramkissoon. Poets read from their new and published works related to issues of justice and discuss the events and experiences that inspired them. Monica Miller, Associate Professor of English at Barnard College, will introduce the poets, and a moderated discussion, led by Columbia School of the Arts professor and poet Timothy Donnelly, and questions from the audience follow the readings.

Max Hayward is a PhD student in Philosophy at Columbia University and the Public Humanities Fellow at the Heyman Center for the Humanities. Having seen first-hand the transformational power of education, and of philosophy in particular, he is committed to bringing the humanities to as wide an audience as possible. To this end, he has helped to found a project that runs discussion groups on philosophy that bring together Columbia graduate students with young parolees in Harlem, in co-operation with the Harlem Justice Community Program. During the Fellowship, Max worked on expanding this project.

Max Hayward, Public Humanities Fellow at the Heyman Center for the Humanities, will present a discussion on the conception and implementation of Rethink, a philosophy community outreach program that runs philosophical talks with court-involved youth in Harlem. Hayward's focus is two-fold: First, he seeks to explore what it is that philosophical thinking has to offer a wider public, and what role philosophy as a discipline has to play in pressing issues such as those that confront participants in Rethink. Secondly, Hayward aims to suggest ways in which public engagement can be an enriching resource for philosophy, and present a particular conception of one subfield of philosophy--ethics--according to which public engagement is an indispensable epistemological tool.