Wolf Humanities Center 2020–2021 Programming

The Wolf Humanities Center, a central hub for interdisciplinary humanities research and public programming, explores “Choice” as its topic for the 2020–2021 academic year.

“The choice to concentrate on choice has already produced a wonderful cohort of scholars with an incredible range of interests and backgrounds who meet weekly—albeit virtually at the moment—to share works-in-progress and discuss our common investment in thinking about how choice shapes our world,” says Sophia Rosenfeld, Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History and this year’s topic director.

The center’s upcoming public programming initiative complements the academic discussion, engaging artists, novelists, musicians, historians, computer scientists, legal scholars, and more in a range of events, all addressing some aspect of choice and its operation or effects. Upcoming public events include “Parent Choices, Language Choice, and Deaf Flourishing,” “Choice in the Time of a Pandemic,” and “Freedom and Choice in Art and Literature.”

Rosenfeld says that choice is often more complex than it may seem. “In all cultures and societies, people make choices,” she explains. “But when, where, and how these choices are made, and who gets to make them, has varied considerably across time and space. Also, whether through informal or legal prohibition, some features of our lives have always been placed outside the realm of choice, and this makes the rules around choice and their implications ripe for analysis from multiple perspectives.”

The Wolf Humanities Center’s goals are to demonstrate how vital the humanities are to the life of the mind and the health of society, and how fundamentally connected they are with many areas of urgent inquiry, including in medicine, law, business, public life, and the sciences.

To learn more about the center and its annual topics, click here.