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Linda Infante Lyons’ paintings line the walls of her studio in Anchorage, Alaska. From “icon portraits” to landscapes, her artwork holds a palpable verve — carrying a panorama of stories, ideas, and interpretations with them, often centered on Alutiiq culture and identity.

From April 6 to 17, Infante Lyons will bring her visual and academic storytelling to Syracuse University as the Humanities Center’s 2026 Jeannette K. Watson Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Humanities. Her two-week residency is organized around the theme of Visions of Resilience: Sacred Art & Storied Landscapes...

On March 21, Worldwide Quilting Day, the Humanities Center’s Syracuse Symposium on “Creativity” featured “Stitching Our Stories: Threads of Self, Community and Future,” welcoming three star-powered quilters — Valerie Goodwin, Chawne Kimber, and Thomas Knauer — to speak on their artistic journeys, work, and inspiration. This event was the culmination of four “sew-in” workshops hosted by a team of rotating facilitators since October, where participants designed quilt blocks centered on four distinct themes: person, place, community, and imagined futures...

In an increasingly interconnected world, the ability to understand cultures beyond our own has never been more important. One of the most powerful ways to achieve that knowledge is through literature and cultural work. Accessing the stories, texts and art that reflect the daily lives and values of people across the globe makes one world legible to another and offers the potential to bridge divides. Two events featured in this year's Syracuse Symposium on "Creativity," presented by the Humanities Center focus on "Creativity in Translation."

Cary Peñate’s selection for a prestigious summer residency at the National Humanities Center (NHC) in North Carolina will further strengthen and expand her research into how Afro-Cuban dance music was depicted in early film soundtracks. The program offers uninterrupted research time, dedicated writing space, full library services, weekly professional development sessions and more -- an opportunity made possible with support from the Syracuse University Humanities Center.

Today’s challenges, ranging from public health crises to social inequities, don’t fit neatly into single disciplines. When scholars collaborate across fields, they combine complementary knowledge, methods and perspectives to create solutions no one researcher could achieve alone.

This approach is central to the College of Arts and Sciences’ (A&S) Engaged Humanities Network (EHN), where scholars, teachers, students, artists and community partners work together to serve the public good and build relationships of trust.

The ability to write and share our ideas is often taken for granted. We rarely stop to ask, is writing enough?

This question was addressed in January during a Humanities Center Syracuse Symposium event on the theme of creativity with Dr. Moira Marquis, Manager of Higher Education Partnerships at the Petey Greene Program, and Johnny Page, Director of Reentry for the Illinois Department of Human Services. For incarcerated writers, who face numerous barriers to writing and education, there are no easy answers.

Humanities Center Spring 2026 Faculty Fellows are developing books that extend interests cultivated throughout their academic pursuits, underline the power of scholarship, and showcase the humanities' capacity to shed light on longstanding issues with new frameworks and ideas.

On a February morning, members of the University community sat down at their keyboards with a shared purpose: to pull the voices of history out of the archive and into the digital age—one keystroke at a time.

Gathering at the Humanities Center on Feb. 13 to mark Douglass Day 2026—the annual national celebration honoring abolitionist Frederick Douglass—faculty, staff and students spent the afternoon transcribing collected documents from the Colored Conventions, a Black political movement that spanned seven decades in the 1800s.

The Humanities Center’s 2025-2026 Dissertation Fellows, Kellan D. L. Head (philosophy) and Abigail H. Long (composition and cultural rhetoric), are forging new paths in the Humanities and challenging prevailing ideas in their fields. From philosophy to writing pedagogy, Head’s and Long’s dissertations plant intellectual seeds that have been nurtured by their research, past academic pursuits, and personal experiences. All are invited to learn more about their projects, through video presentations and live conversation at 'Meet the Scholars Coffee Hour' event on Feb. 27.

In an era increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence and automation, the distinctly human capacity for creativity has never been more vital for building resilient communities and fostering the understanding needed in moments of deep division.

The Syracuse University Humanities Center's spring programming for its Syracuse Symposium demonstrates the multifaceted power of “CREATIVITY” through events that span art, literary translation, textile arts and video production. Participants can engage with or witness creativity as a mode of healing and as a medium for social change.