A Physical Hub for the Humanities

In July 2024, the Cogut Institute moved into its new home, Andrews House. With a beautiful renovation designed by the architectural firm Goody Clancy and a location close to the Main Green, Andrews House on Brown Street serves the University as a distinctive site for humanities programming, teaching, and research.

Andrews House has been transformative for the institute beyond our expectations. The thoughtful design of space flexibly allows for a range of teaching and programming formats. Beyond this, we now have the capacity not only to house our own programs and courses, but also to host programs and courses developed by other units across campus. Every week, hundreds of members of the University community come through our doors.

The new building also includes work and community space for our entire fellowship community. The fellows have made the building a home away from home, filling offices with books and keeping long hours. Undergraduate and graduate fellows in particular have been vocal about how meaningful the space has been, saying that it’s helped them to focus on their research, to build camaraderie with each other, and, most important, to know that their work matters to the University.

Read more about Andrews House

Understanding AI and Its Human Impact

Our inaugural multi-year Collaborative Humanities Lab, “Models-Scale-Context: AI and the Humanities,” has gathered involvement from across the University, including through a series of 10 reading groups proposed by students, faculty, and staff. Covering topics such as AI in science fiction; automation; general systems theory; and AI and racial justice, the participants represent 25 fields of inquiry across the humanities, the social sciences, and the sciences.

Over the course of the year, the lab hosted several public lectures on topics ranging from cybernetics and systems theory, authorship in the age of AI, and the cybersecurity of fairy tales. The year’s programming culminated in a daylong interdisciplinary workshop titled “Models: Humanities at the Edge of the Human,” convened by faculty members Lindsay Caplan (History of Art and Architecture) and Debbie Weinstein (American Studies). Scholars from across fields discussed how modeling has variously shaped disciplines as well as the techno-creative endeavors associated with AI and its precursors.

Read more about the Lab

Confronting Environmental Crises

The Center for Environmental Humanities (CEHAB) officially launched in 2024–25 under the leadership of inaugural director Macarena Gómez-Barris (Modern Culture and Media, Brown Arts Institute). This year’s programming explored questions including the arts of land and water defense, eco-poetics, plastics, and media and arts practice. Events featured scholars and creators offering novel perspectives on the climate crisis, extractivist practices, and the Global South.

In summer 2025, the center hosted the second installment of “In the Dissolution: Climate Change, Decolonization, and Global Blackness,” a weeklong workshop in partnership with Duke University, led by Gómez-Barris and Michaeline Crichlow (Duke University | African and African American Studies). A cohort of graduate students and invited artists and scholars joined in seminars, discussions, and readings exploring the interconnectedness of climate change and colonial exploitation. Invited artists and scholars included Julian Talamantez Brolaski, Jayna Brown (Brown University | Theatre Arts and Performance Studies), Anny-Dominique Curtius (University of Iowa | Francophone Studies), Denise Ferreira da Silva (New York University | Spanish and Portuguese), Leila Lehnen (Brown University | Portuguese and Brazilian Studies), madison moore (Brown University | Modern Culture and Media), and Alexander Weheliye (Brown University | Modern Culture and Media).

Read more about CEHAB

The Fellows Seminar

The Fellows Seminar reflects the institute’s commitment to supporting a broad scholarly community enriching individual inquiry and research. Fellows in the humanities and humanistic social sciences representing all stages of career — from undergraduates to faculty — come together to discuss work-in-progress, gaining insights into their own disciplines’ concepts and methods, offering their perspectives and expertise to others, and forging meaningful working relationships.

This year’s fellows, representing 25 different fields of inquiry, pursued research projects that will evolve into future books, conference papers, and other forms of scholarly transmission. Watch a selection of faculty fellows introducing their projects.

Explore more videos of 2024–25 fellows’ research

At the end of the year, the undergraduate fellows reflected on the value of the fellowship to their Brown University experience, highlighting the ways in which an interdisciplinary and multi-rank environment shaped their sense of themselves as scholars.

Engaging Students Across Campus in Shared Inquiry

Among the institute’s collaborative humanities course offerings this past year were nine team-taught graduate seminars including “Faces: From Masks to Deepfake,” “Technologies of Memory,” “Archive Theory: Imagining Absence Otherwise,” and “Decolonial Futurities: Submerged Perspectives from and Within the Americas.”

Two of these courses organized major public events. From the course “Archive Theory: Imagining Absence Otherwise,” taught by Kiana Murphy (American Studies) and Alejandra Rosenberg Navarro (Hispanic Studies), came the conference “Tending the Gap: Storytelling as Archival Method.” The conference gave students across nine departments at Brown and RISD the opportunity to present their research and concluded with a keynote lecture by Ahmad Greene-Hayes (Harvard Divinity School | African American Religious Studies), titled “Quadrants and Marginalia: Mapping Black Religion in the Archive.”

And from the course “Decolonial Futurities,” taught by Macarena Gómez-Barris (Modern Culture and Media) and Leila Lehnen (Portuguese and Brazilian Studies), came multiple events, including a panel featuring Indigenous artists Olinda Yawar Tupinambá and Ziel Karapotó.

2024–25 Course Catalog

Greg and Julie Flynn Cogut Institute Speaker Series

The institute’s flagship lecture series brought to campus three high-profile speakers. Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Natalie Diaz read from her poetry and discussed its engagement with Indigenous identity and language revitalization. Best-selling author and journalist Ed Yong, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic, explored the ways in which non-human animals perceive the world and how we can be better stewards of the planet. And celebrated historian Timothy Snyder spoke on threats to democracy and the importance of collective action.

These speakers also held special seminars for groups of undergraduates in disciplines representing the breadth of the humanities and other fields such as international and public affairs, economics, computer science, biology, and neuroscience.

This is a time of unprecedented federal funding cuts and budgetary challenges in higher education. You can help Brown University continue to offer world-class humanities research and teaching by supporting the Cogut Institute. The institute offers the resources and opportunities that the humanities community at Brown needs for fueling vibrant new fields such as the environmental humanities and health humanities, launching innovative new courses, and positioning our students and faculty to make their voices heard beyond the University. Your gift will directly empower scholars to pursue urgent questions, forge new collaborations, and shape the public conversations that define our future.

There are space-naming opportunities in the Andrews House that will help us to expand our programming and teaching. A gift in support of these priorities will also contribute to growing the humanities faculty, extending financial support to scholars, and enriching the student experience:

• Humanities Initiative Professorships
• Interdisciplinary centers and initiatives
• Graduate student training and professionalization
• Our essential Director’s Innovation Fund

Give now to the Cogut Institute

To learn more about how your gift will make an impact, please contact Shelley Roth P’17, P’20, Director of Development for Academic Initiatives, at shelley_roth@brown.edu or (401) 863-6592.