Dear colleagues:
I am delighted to share the news that Cajetan Iheka, Professor of English, has been appointed Director of the Whitney Humanities Center for a three-year term, effective July 1, 2023. Professor Iheka succeeds Alice Kaplan, who has served as Director of the Whitney Humanities Center since 2020.
Professor Iheka is a scholar of African and Caribbean Literatures specializing in ecocriticism and ecomedia. His work explores the political and formal implications of a wide range of African cultural productions, spanning literature, film, photography, and the visual arts. He is the author of two pathbreaking monographs, Naturalizing Africa: Ecological Violence, Agency, and Postcolonial Resistance in African Literature (Cambridge UP, 2018) and African Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics (Duke UP, 2021), that bridge African studies, literary and media studies, and the environmental humanities. Both books have been honored with multiple awards, including the African Studies Association Best Book Prize (the most prestigious award in the discipline) for African Ecomedia. Iheka’s scholarship argues the centrality of Africa to understanding media materiality and infrastructure and demonstrates how the very media forms that narrate the problems of ecological degradation contribute to environmental destruction. His work is a landmark effort to consider how narrative participates in human beings’ relationship to climate change. Professor Iheka, who has held fellowships from the Mellon and Carnegie foundations, is the editor of two volumes of essays and the author of numerous articles that have broadened conversations in literary history and environmental studies.
Colleagues of Professor Iheka, a current Whitney Fellow, are inspired by his sense of the collective good that drives much of his work. He is known for generously making time to attend talks, read draft work, and advocate on behalf of emerging scholars both at Yale and beyond. His intellectual reach and enthusiasm for collaboration will build bridges from the Whitney Humanities Center at the Humanities Quadrangle to scholars across the University, including in the departments of English and Film and Media Studies, the MacMillan Center, the art galleries, as well as the Council on African Studies. This bridgebuilding ethos was on display during the highly successful symposium on Black Environmentalisms that Professor Iheka co-organized in Fall 2022, with participants drawn from around the world and from across Yale’s schools and departments. In addition to his role at the Whitney, Professor Iheka will serve as Chair of the Council on African Studies and as Head of the Yale Africa Initiative, both housed at the MacMillan Center.
Professor Iheka will continue the visionary work of Alice Kaplan, Sterling Professor of French, and founding director of the Yale Translation Initiative, who has served as Director during three crucial years of change. Professor Kaplan oversaw the Whitney’s move from 53 Wall Street to its new home in the Humanities Quadrangle, and sustained community into and after the COVID-19 campus shutdown. Throughout this epoch of dramatic change, Kaplan brought to her leadership intellectual cosmopolitanism and a powerful humanistic voice on campus, as demonstrated by a recent letter from the director she posted. Under her leadership, the Whitney Fellows program has thrived, building community even in the most isolated months of the pandemic. Kaplan fostered innovative efforts to support graduate students in the humanities, including the development of WHC Graduate Fellowships in the Environmental Humanities and summer fellowships for graduate student translation projects. Her spirit of partnership and collaboration has marked her directorship: she has partnered with RITM, The Yale Review, the MacMillan Center and other units on a host of programs. Her passion for literature has been evident in the writers she has brought to campus, as lecturers and as semester-long fellows. Her commitment to the presence of Yale scholarship internationally has resulted in increased support for publications and translations of books by Yale faculty.
After she steps down from her role on June 30, 2023, Kaplan will continue to collaborate with Iheka and with Whitney Humanities Center Associate Director, Diane Berrett Brown, on a new initiative, the Whitney Publishing Project, which aims to help graduate students and faculty navigate the publication process.
I hope that you will join me in congratulating and thanking Professors Iheka and Kaplan.
Best wishes,
Kathryn Lofton
Acting Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences
FAS Dean of Humanities
Lex Hixon Professor of Religious Studies, of American Studies, of History, and of Divinity