The Humanities Institute
Founded in 1986, the Humanities Institute presents a thematic program each semester on a topic related to the humanities. As part of Scripps’ tradition of interdisciplinary education, this program includes lectures, conferences, exhibitions, performances, and film series bringing prominent and younger cutting-edge scholars to campus.
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Latest Program
(Re)Centering the World: Examining the nature of well-documented disasters—genocide, earthquakes, hurricanes, climate change—and how they are being negotiated in the present day.
How might we institute better, more humane and humanistic responses to disasters, whether natural or man-made? How might we engender more productive conversations about the visions and failures of “disaster prevention” and “disaster relief”? The Humanities Institute will address these questions and more as part of its yearlong slate of public events.
The Scripps College Humanities Institute 2019-20 season acknowledges that the Claremont Colleges are settled on the shared traditional land of the Tongva, Serrano, and Cahuilla peoples, many of whom continue to steward the land, their ancestral home. We recognize that this statement of territory acknowledgment can only serve as partial restitution in a decolonial process which must make broader measures to understand and reconcile with the colonial history of this land; our programming over the 2019-20 season, which includes First Nations participants, and partners with Indigenous groups and institutions at the 5-Cs and locally, attempts to begin to do just this.
Upcoming Event
Public Event – Billy-Ray Belcourt
February 20, 2019
12:15 pm
Hampton Room
Scripps College
Wednesday, February 20, 2020
12:15 pm
Hampton Room, Scripps College
The Indigenous Canadian poet, author of This Wound Is a World, winner of the 2018 Griffin Poetry Prize, Billy-Ray Belcourt discusses his work.
Billy-Ray Belcourt is from the Driftpile Cree Nation. He is a Ph.D. student and 2018 Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Scholar in the Department of English & Film Studies at the University of Alberta. This Wound is a World is his first book; it won the 2018 Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize (making him the youngest recipient), the 2018 Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize, and a 2018 Indigenous Voices Award. It was also named the best “Canadian poetry” collection of 2017by CBC Books. His sophomore book, NDN Coping Mechanisms: Notes from the Field, is due out in the fall of 2019 with House of Anansi Press.
Presented in partnership with Scripps Presents and Pitzer College Indigenous Studies faculty.