2023 SIAH Theme

A Black Sense: Time, Art, and Being

June 20 – August 18, 2023

Our starting point in the 2023 Summer Institute in Arts and Humanities is a question of knowledge: In which ways is reality and existence knowable? What factors mediate between us and the world, and determine how we experience and comprehend what exists outside of ourselves? How does a sense of what exists move between individual and collective experience, and how do our senses shape what we can know, imagine, and do? How does the frame of Black studies – and a Black sense – as a particular intellectual and political project further animate these questions? How do we sense and pay attention in Black studies?

The 2023 Summer Institute in Arts and Humanities will interrogate “sense,” which includes feeling as a way of knowing, perception, sensorium (across sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell), embodiment, and movement. “Sense” is the route to capacious registers of understanding in Black historiographies, art and aesthetics, critical theory, and futures. Using “sense” as a throughline, this course will explore Black studies across freedom and liberation movements (including abolition), visuality, music, the literary imagination, feminist and queer theater and performance practices, protest, and geographies. Across this course, students will learn research methods to produce a final project such as an essay, curatorial project, or creative assignment. Students will engage the questions raised in this course through their own commitments, concerns, and interests.

Learn more about the 2023 teaching team, application process, and sign up for an information session.