By Sean Latham, Director
“Long before I wrote stories,” Eudora Welty once said, “I listened for stories.” This elegant little phrase offers a powerful, if subtle definition of what the embattled humanities might become. Welty knew that we cannot make anything new unless we first pause to hear the cacophony around us: those voices that echo from the past, clamor in the present, and beckon from our possible futures. As The University of Tulsa’s Oklahoma Center for the Humanities celebrates its 10th anniversary, its mission has become simple. We work each day to hear and share such stories so that we might magic them into something new.
It was not always like this. Initially, we had a conventional mission: support interdisciplinary faculty research by breaking down departmental silos. But the university is small, has only one doctoral program in the humanities, and, though private, takes seriously its commitment to serving the complex city we call home. Tulsa has been (sometimes all at once) the nexus of “Indian country;” the oil capital of the world; the epicenter of climate disaster; and home to a wealthy Black community nearly destroyed by the nation’s deadliest race massacre.
Put another way, stories course thickly around the place, so we learned to listen with rigor and compassion. This meant empowering an external community board to direct our efforts, then recruiting “public fellows” to an annual research seminar. Our work thus intentionally connects faculty and students to people from the larger Tulsa area who possess unique expertise that extends far beyond academe. Together, this group brings the tools of the arts and humanities to bear on our most pressing challenges.
The more we listened, the more the center changed from a university institute into a community hub – a process that accelerated when we moved to the Tulsa Arts District, where three tribal nations intersect with the historic Greenwood neighborhood. We now had access to galleries that allowed us to open a space for our shared stories to be told in creative, accessible ways. We built novel partnerships and hosted, for example, an exhibition and summit on Oklahoma’s unique all-Black towns – once beacons of freedom that fell victim to rural depopulation. And, in cooperation with Native American partners, we assembled an exhibition on Indigenous sovereignty in a state defined by overlapping boundaries, governments, and identities.
In May 2024, we received the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes’ inaugural Public Humanities Award for Leadership in Practice and Community – an international honor that finally gave a name to our decade-long efforts to bend the humanities toward the public good. I’m suspicious of such labels, however, and so still think of the center as human space where we first listen carefully then work collaboratively to fashion the stories that surround, shape, terrify, and inspire us.
Sean Latham is the director of The University of Tulsa’s Oklahoma Center for the Humanities. He also serves as the director of UTulsa’s Institute for Bob Dylan Studies and the Pauline McFarlin Walter Chair in English & Comparative Literature in UTulsa’s Kendall College for Arts & Sciences.