In her 2025 David P. Gardner Graduate Lecture in the Humanities and Fine Arts on October 23, Jesmyn Ward shared with the audience at the Salt Lake City Public Library a new piece to appear in an upcoming collected edition of her writing. A personal memoir essay, Ward’s lecture recounted her writing of her recent […]
Read MoreAt a Tanner Humanities Center and Marriott Library event on October 20, journalist Alex Beam introduced his new biography, Wallace Stegner: Dean of Western Writers (Signature Books). Drawing on the Stegner archive housed in the Marriott Library’s Special Collections, Beam traced the novelist’s complicated life and enduring impact on American letters and environmental thought. The […]
Read MoreThe Tanner Humanities Center’s second annual Evening with Great Books event was held at the Alta Club in downtown Salt Lake City on October 16. More than sixty community members and Center supporters enjoyed dinner and brief lectures from College of Humanities faculty, including some from the course, Great Books in the Humanities: Jordan Johansen […]
Read MoreEnvironmental Humanities graduate student Teri Harman was a key organizer of The Water Commons: Living Legacies of Utah Waterways held on September 19, 2025 at the Marriott Library Gould Auditorium. The event was sponsored by Tanner Humanities Center, American West Center, School of the Environment, and Environmental Humanities Program. Below are written answers to questions […]
Read MoreDaniel Mendelsohn has spent six and a half years completing a new translation of Homer’s Odyssey for the University of Chicago Press—the publisher’s first since Richmond Lattimore’s influential 1962 edition. The author of the acclaimed memoir An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic (2017), which recounts his father’s enrollment in his freshman Odyssey […]
Read MoreAnnual Report for 2025 In our annual report, you can learn about the Tanner Humanities Center’s 2024–2025 events and fellowships, strategic goals in the upcoming year, and new initiatives. Download (pdf)
Read MoreThe Tanner Humanities Center is pleased to announce its calendar of public events for 2025–2026. All events are free and open to the public, though advance registration may be required. More information about times, locations, and tickets for each event will be posted in our Events. National Theatre Live screenings and Work-in-Progress talks by Center […]
Read MoreEvery spring, research fellows at the Tanner Humanities Center give work-in-progress talks in a casual setting and receive feedback from colleagues across campus. “Our community of fellows is at the heart of the Tanner Humanities Center, and our weekly works in progress talks are at the heart of the fellows’ community,” says Scott Black, […]
Read MoreNeither transparent vehicles of meaning, nor expressions of authenticity, writing systems, or scripts, encode the contingencies of historical events and often exceed their intended purpose. This dynamism of scripts was the subject of the 2025 Tanner Lecture on Human Values, delivered by David Damrosch at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts on April 9, followed […]
Read MoreAuthor and scholar Louis Chude-Sokei explored the complexities of Black identity across the African diaspora at a Tanner Conversation event at the Salt Lake City Public Library on April 1. Chude-Sokei is Professor of English, George and Joyce Wein Chair in African-American and Black Diaspora Studies, and Director of the African-American and Black Diaspora Studies […]
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