Robert Penn Warren Center

Katie Crawford, Cornelius Vanderbilt Chair, professor of history, and chair of the Department of Gender and Sexuality Studies, has been named the interim director of the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities. Crawford’s appointment follows the five-year leadership of Holly Tucker, Mellon Foundation Chair in the Humanities and professor of French, who is stepping down to pursue her research and new trans-institutional projects. Read More

Jefferson Cowie, James G. Stahlman Professor of History at Vanderbilt University, was recently honored with a 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship—in part, in anticipation of his upcoming project, tentatively titled Crosswinds of a Common History, which will take a visionary approach to historical nonfiction. Read More

On National Humanities Alliance’s advocacy day in D.C., through a series of meetings and a social media campaign, Vanderbilt students advocated for federal funding to support the National Endowment for the Humanities. This effort was part of the Robert Penn Warren Center’s Humanities in the Real World: Undergraduate Advocacy Fellowship in collaboration with Vanderbilt’s Office of Federal Relations.  Read More

Heglar will offer a public lecture at Vanderbilt at 4:15 p.m. on Tuesday, Feb. 20, to kick off the Vanderbilt Eco-Grief Initiative, a yearlong interdisciplinary project that will use art to illustrate the emotions evoked by living through climate change.   Read More

The Curb Center is pleased to announce the Vanderbilt Eco-Grief Initiative, a yearlong collaborative project that will use art as a tool to investigate the complex set of emotions—sorrow, guilt, terror, complicity and a range of others—that come to mind as we contemplate our changing climate and witness its effects on earthly life. By engaging artists working in a range of disciplines—theater, creative writing and the visual arts—the Curb Center aims to highlight creative work that confronts the emotional dimensions of climate change with the hope that true emotional reckoning might serve as an avenue to candid dialogue, innovation and lasting impact. Read More

See how more than 200 students and faculty came together through 19 interdisciplinary hands-on courses to turn the historic Vaughn home into a living laboratory, unveiling "hidden narratives" of Vanderbilt's and Nashville's past. Read More

Vanderbilt University will be well represented at the 2023 Southern Festival of Books: A Celebration of the Written Word, where a significant number of faculty and authors with ties to the university will discuss their works Oct. 18–22. Read More

Join students and faculty from the Department of Anthropology to learn more about Vanderbilt’s early history through archaeological excavation on the grounds of a service workers’ cabin once located behind the first faculty residences on campus. Ongoing investigations at the Vaughn Home (currently the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities) will be open to the public on Saturday, Oct. 14, from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Read More

Since its founding in 1873, Vanderbilt has stayed true to its roots by breaking new ground in various ways, whether in its capacity to be a more welcoming and inclusive community, or in its pursuit of discoveries that help answer humanity’s most pressing questions. Here we present an illustrated guide to just a few of the many pioneering figures who have helped Vanderbilt dare to grow throughout its history. Read More

Jon Parrish Peede, BS’91, former director of the National Endowment for the Humanities, reflects on his respect for the late Vereen Bell. Read More

Few people in the university’s history have been as loyal to Vanderbilt as long and as selflessly as Stella Scott Vaughn. She grew up on campus and was one of Vanderbilt’s earliest woman graduates. She served as the university’s first female physical-education instructor and coach, working her first nine years without pay. She also took on the unofficial role as dean of women students. Read More

“Virgins, Mothers, and Martyrs: Women in Early Christian Africa,” delivered by Kate Cooper on April 27, 2015. This event was sponsored by Vanderbilt University’s Department of Classical Studies, The Carpenter Program in Religion, Gender and Sexuality at Vanderbilt Divinity School, and the Late Antiquity seminar at Vanderbilt’s Robert Penn… Read More

Moderator Paul Freedman, Chester D. Tripp Professor of History, Yale University; Director of the Warren Center 1993-1997 Deborah Cohn, Spanish, Indiana University; Warren Center Fellow 2000-2001 Nihad Farooq, English, Georgia Tech University; Warren Center Fellow 2013-2013 Sharryn Kasmir, Anthropology, Hofstra University; Warren Center Fellow 1998-1999 Jemima… Read More

Moderator Helmut W. Smith, Martha Rivers Ingram Professor of History and Professor of European Studies; Director of the Warren Center, 2005-2008 Leo Coleman, Comparative Studies, Ohio State University; Warren Center Fellow 2011-2012 Cara Finnegan, Communication Studies, University of Illinois; Warren Center Fellow 2006-2007 Richard Grusin, English, University… Read More

Moderator Charles E. Scott, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus; Director of the Warren Center, 1987-1993 Jean Feerick, English, John Carroll University; Warren Center Fellow, 2005-2006 Gilbert Herdt, Sexuality Studies, San Francisco State University; Warren Center Fellow 1997-1998 Richard King, History, University of Nottingham; Warren Center Fellow 2001-2002… Read More

Moderator Edward H. Friedman, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of Spanish and Professor of Comparative Literature; Director of the Warren Center, 2008-present Susan Hegeman, English, University of Florida;, Warren Center Fellow 1996-1997 Anne Morey, English, Texas A&M University, Warren Center Fellow 2010-2011 Arkady Plotinsky, English, Purdue University; Warren… Read More

In the last five years a grassroots faculty collaboration with the University of Leipzig has flowered, making the historic German university one of Vanderbilt's half dozen strategic international partners. Read More

Watch video of Edward L. Ayers, President and Professor of History at the University of Richmond, present this year’s Harry C. Howard Jr. Lecture on Thursday, October 18 in Flynn Auditorium. His talk is entitled “The Humanities in Our Times.” Prior to his appointment at the University of Richmond, Ayers… Read More

Rebecca Traister, a Salon.com senior writer who covered the 2008 presidential race from a feminist and personal perspective, will speak at Vanderbilt University’s Stevenson Center at 7 p.m. Feb. 22. Read More

Watch video of María Elisa Velásquez delivering the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities’ 2012 Black Atlantic Lecture Feb. 2. Renowned experts on preservation of African and Afro-descended slave records gathered at Vanderbilt Feb. 2-4 to launch the university’s new Ecclesiastical and Secular Sources for Slave Societies digital archive and… Read More