Humanities Institute

Film screening with Q&A to follow (Director Jeff Roy and Maya Jafer) Mohammed to Maya (aka Rites of Passage) is a feature-length documentary that examines issues of gender, religion, and tradition against the backdrop of a single person’s dramatic journey. M2M follows one year in the life of Maya Jafer (formerly Mohammed Jafer), a South Asian Muslim from Chennai, India, as she makes her gender […]

"Deng Xiaoping vs. Gorbachev: Could Russia Have Followed the Pattern of Chinese Reforms?" Sponsors: University at Buffalo Confucius Institute, with support from the Asian Studies Program, the History Department, and the Honors College Abstract: Pantsov will discuss why Gorbachev ended up presiding over the fall of the Soviet Union, while Deng Xiaoping was able to steer […]

An adaptation of the Norse tales that inspired Wagner’s Ring Cycle – by Sean Graney Directed by Sean Graney, Eileen Silvers WBFO Visiting Professor in the Arts and Humanities Presented in conjunction with UB’s Humanities Institute, the Department of English, with additional support from by the Robert G. and Carol L. Morris Visiting Artist Fund […]

Keynote Address: “Islam and Muslims in an age of ISIS and Islamophobia” Fifteen years after the horrific attacks of 9/11, the American Muslim community and the American democratic experiment both find themselves in a perilous state. Few American communities are viewed with more hostility, negativity and suspicion. On one hand, the American Muslim community has […]

"China and the World: 1950s Urban Culture and Planning" A workshop for SUNY faculty and students Sponsored by the SUNY Network of Excellence in Arts and Humanities, with support from the Confucius Institute, the Asian Studies Program, the History Department, and the Cities and Society Workshop of the Humanities Institute. For information: Contact Kristin Stapleton […]

HI's annual celebration of recently published books written by former Faculty Fellows

Tony Conrad was a SUNY Distinguished Professor and a faculty member in DMS for 40 years. He was a larger-than-life media pioneer key in the establishment of Media Study at Buffalo, internationally recognized as an experimental artist, a visionary pioneer in numerous media his entire life, and enthusiastically dedicated to the arts in Western New […]

Works in Progress "Bauhaus New Women" Organized by the Modernisms Research Workshop This Work in Progress session on May 5 will be followed at 3:30 by a general meeting of everyone interested in the MRW (with refreshments) to plan our 2016-17 schedule and events, assuming that the Humanities Institute renews our funding.  If you can't make it to […]

Emergent Masculinities: Gendered Power and Social Change in the African Atlantic He examines how changing gender identities between 1750 and 1920 in the West African Bight of Biafra defined the 1.6 million slaves exported to the Americas. Mbah draws on European colonial and missionary archives, oral interviews, participatory ethnography, and film documentation of material culture […]

Cristanne Miller Cris Miller is this year’s Featured Speaker at HI’s External Grant Writing Workshop Photograph: Douglas Levere In order to support and promote a culture of grant writing in the humanities, in 2013 HI began holding an annual External Grant Writing Workshop that takes place each September. The Workshop consists of a featured speaker who […]