The Tanner Humanities Center’s public events for 2025-2026
The 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,…
Tanner fellows’ work-in-progress talks: Alexis Christensen, John Harfouch, Megan Weiss, Ataya Cesspooch, and Thérèse de Raedt
Every 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…
David Damrosch: Tanner Lecture on Human Values and Symposium on scriptworlds
Neither 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…
Louis Chude-Sokei: Sound and cultures of the Black diaspora
Author 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,…
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich: Sterling M. McMurrin lecture on Mormon Studies and Claudia Lauper Bushman
In a culminating keynote to a festschrift conference on March 15 honoring the work of Claudia Lauper Bushman, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich discussed the institutional and biographical contexts for Bushman’s career as a scholar…
Ed Yong: How birding changed my life
To a packed and enthusiastic auditorium at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts on February 25, Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer Ed Yong discussed the implications of becoming “bird curious.” Having become increasingly popular…
Tanner Conversation: “This Abominable Slavery: Race, Religion, and the Battle Over Human Bondage in Antebellum Utah”
A panel discussion at the Tanner Humanities Center on March 4th featured authors of a new historical study that illuminates the complex debates around slavery and unfree labor in early Utah Territory. The…
Tanner fellows’ work-in-progress talks: Jake Nelson, Brandon Render, Jessie Chaplain, Christopher Miller, and Lindsey Webb
Every 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…
Isabel Moreira: “Balthild of Francia: Anglo-Saxon Slave, Merovingian Queen, and Abolitionist Saint”
In the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris stand twenty white marble statues of queens and illustrious women in French history, a series commissioned during the 19th-century reign of King Louis-Philippe as part of a…
Peggy Battin, James Tabery, David Turok: Opt-in reproduction and medical ethics
What if advances in technology were already changing the causal logic of human reproduction which is now taken for granted? Could pregnancy shift from an event which some opt out of through prevention…
Percival Everett: Fiction, race, and philosophy
The works of Percival Everett, Distinguished Professor at the University of Southern California, feature satirical and ironic accounts of race in American life, experiments in literary form, and philosophically rich reconsiderations of historical…
An Evening with Great Books features old and new classics
Now in its second year at the University of Utah, Great Books in the Humanities introduces first-year students to foundational literary and philosophical works from across world civilizations, alongside recent scholarship that deepens our understanding…