2025-2026 Annual Theme

The Humanities Center at Texas Tech was founded in 2015. As the Center begins the second decade of its existence, our programming for 2025-2026 will focus on the concept integral to its founding: Humanity. This theme--in fact, humanities research tout court--provides a broad site of analysis through which we can investigate and critique both the past and the future, innovation and tradition.  In the face of the burgeoning specter of Artificial General Intelligence and even Superintelligence, it seems more necessary than ever that we stake out the territory of Humanity. For ten years, across public programming and funded research, the Humanities Center has been doing just that, foregrounding and analyzing what it means to be human. Scholars in the humanities at TTU have contemplated the Anthropocene and theorized the post-human. We have performed archival work and close reading. We have proposed humanistic solutions to modern problems and offered novel ways of revisiting collective pasts. Throughout 2025-2026, we will stage interdisciplinary discussions about Humanity across five keywords: agency, equality, pleasure, violence, and death. Amid this year-long theme, we will pay tribute to the Center’s first decade by thinking about novel possibilities for its second.