Fox Center 2025-26 Theme: "Life/Story"

From biography to ethnography, microhistory to philosophical treatise, scholars have long seen individual lives as a key to unlocking larger truths. The Fox Center’s 2025-26 theme, Life/Story, draws its inspiration from the many ways humanities fields and disciplines often approach a single life as the entry point for examining broad political, socio-cultural, and historical phenomena. By foregrounding the life story we emphasize that the narrative arc and interpretive analysis is performed by another—whether novelist, historian, philosopher, or anthropologist—and that the elicitation and telling are themselves worthy of analysis. For some scholars, the craft may resemble intimate portraiture; for others, it may be more akin to a pathologist’s post-mortem.

As for the life behind the story, we will examine the challenges and creative possibilities afforded by subjects both renowned and obscure, both abundantly evidenced and persistent only in fragments; lives proximate in time and space and those lived at great distances from our own. How do different research methods (archival and oral history, ethnography, etc.) and different modes of biographical expression—books, films, poems, novels—help us imagine other lives, other times, other bodies, minds, cultures, regimes, and places? How do different research methods and modes of expression allow us to grapple with other lives, and through them, other times, places, and ways of being? How does attention to a single life shed light upon central themes of the human condition? These will be among the themes evoked and explored in our Life/Story year.

Please learn more about our Life/Story events, our Life/Story fellows and their research, and how to support our work below.