Henry King Stanford Lecture Series in the Humanities

SPRING 2025

To register and learn more about the program, please click the image above. 

Thursday, March 20, 2025 @ 5:00 pm

Richter Library, Third Floor Conference Room

Marlene Daut, Professor of French & African Diaspora Studies, Yale University

The Center for the Humanities, along with colleagues from the University of Miami, would like to invite you to attend the public lecture, “Henry Christophe: King in a World of Kings” by Marlene Daut, Professor of French and African Diaspora Studies at Yale University. This program is the final of the academic year for the Henry King Stanford Distinguished Professors in the Humanities Lecture Series. 

Slave. Revolutionary. King. Taken together, these words describe only one man: Henry Christophe I of Haiti. Born in 1767 to an enslaved mother on the island of Grenada, he first fought to overthrow the British in North America, before helping his fellow enslaved Africans in Saint-Domingue, as Haiti was then called, to gain their freedom from France. Later, he offered to lead independent Haiti and made himself a king. But it all came to a sudden and tragic end when after only thirteen years of ruling, Haiti’s King Henry I shot himself in the heart, some say with a silver bullet. 

Marlene Daut teaches courses in anglophone and francophone Caribbean, African American, and French colonial literary and historical studies. Primarily a literary and intellectual historian of the Caribbean, she writes about the history of the Haitian Revolution, literary cultures of the greater Caribbean, and racial politics in global media, especially as they appear in film and television.

Following the program, our colleagues from Books & Books will facilitate a Book Signing with Marlene Daut. Her publications will also be available for purchase on-site through Books & Books.

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To register and learn more about the program, please click the image above.

A Reading by Ada Limón

24th Poet Laureate of the United States

Thursday, February 20, 2025 @ 7:00 pm

Kislak Center at the University of Miami

Ada Limón is the author of six books of poetry, including The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her book Bright Dead Things was nominated for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Her most recent book of poetry, The Hurting Kind, was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize. She is also the author of two children’s books: In Praise of Mystery, with illustrations by Peter Sís; and And, Too, The Fox, released in 2025. In October of 2023 she was awarded a MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship, and she was named a TIME magazine woman of the year in 2024. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and wrote a poem that was engraved on NASA's Europa Clipper Spacecraft that was launched to the second moon of Jupiter in October 2024. As the 24th Poet Laureate of The United States, her signature project is called You Are Here and focuses on how poetry can help connect us to the natural world. She will serve as Poet Laureate until the spring of 2025.

for parking and directions to the Kislak Center.

FALL 2024

Thursday, September 26 @ 5:00 pm

Richter Library, Third Floor Conference Room

"Imagining the Museum of Slavery"

Charles Forsdick, Drapers Professor of French, Cambridge University

Co-Sponsored by the University of Miami Departments of Anthropology, History, & Modern Languages and Literatures.

 to register for this lecture.

The Center for the Humanities, along with colleagues from the University of Miami, would like to invite you to a public lecture by Professor Charles Forsdick.

The inauguration of the International Slavery Museum (ISM) in Liverpool in 2007 has provided a template for early twenty-first-century institutions seeking to engage with innovative museology relating to the representations of enslavement. Charles Forsdick will situate the imagination of ISM as a museum of slavery as a foundational case study in the broader context of national commemorations (in response to whose customary foregrounding of philanthropy and legislative approaches to abolition, it asserted the agency of the enslaved). Forsdick suggests that the Liverpool museum provided an experimental space in which it was possible to imagine the purpose, define the content and test the parameters of a lieu de mémoire devoted to slavery, the legacies of enslavement and anti-racist education. He will explore the ways in which the Liverpool museum has gone on to serve as a point of reference to inspire the development of museums of slavery, where these institutions draw on aspects of ISM to situate themselves in their own complex, multi-layered cityscapes and memoryscapes. As further sites have been developed, including new museums and memorials in the USA, the need to understand the genealogies of the museum of slavery, with their national variations and international trends, has become increasingly urgent.

Charles Forsdick is a Drapers Professor of French at the University of Cambridge and Professorial Fellow at Murray Edwards College. His teaching and research interests include: Francophone postcolonial studies, particularly postcolonial literature; French colonial history and postcolonial memory; travel writing and exoticism; translation studies; world literature and graphic fiction. He has served as President of the Society for French Studies, 2012-14 and as Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of International Slavery, 2010-13. A Member of the Academy of Europe and Corresponding Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, he is also currently Lead Fellow for Languages at the British Academy. Charles is also Honorary Professor in the Centre for the Study of International Slavery at the University of Liverpool. He edits or co-edits three series for Liverpool University Press, and since 2019, has been a member of the conseil scientifique of the Fondation pour la Mémoire de l’Esclavage.

  for additional information about Professor Forsdick.

Sunday, December 8: Art Week Bubbles and Brunch featuring

Virgil Ortiz: The Future of History

Virgil Ortiz has masterfully redefined what it means to be a contemporary Native American artist navigating the global art world while staying rooted in his Cochiti Pueblo traditions. Ortiz's epic retelling of the 1680 Pueblo Revolt unfolds by illustrating past and present-day social issues through his inventive futuristic protagonists. In this conversation the artist will explore his work, creative process, and unique voice, which is highlighted in Virgil Ortiz: Slipstream (on view at the Lowe Art Museum through January 11, 2025).

To register and learn more about the program, please click the image above.

Confirming your attendance in advance enables sufficient set-up for the program. We look forward to seeing you there!