Repair. It’s a concept and practice we all know well, be it through experiences of sewing back on fallen buttons or of asking our doctor about that ache that just won’t go away. Repair is also a driving term for creative and research work being done across the arts and humanities, from historians examining post-conflict dynamics to literary scholars and artists probing the reinvention of seemingly moribund aesthetic forms. With this broad resonance and capacious reach in mind, Rice University’s Humanities Research Center adopted “Repair” as its 2023–25 theme, organizing events and inviting research and project proposals that spanned disciplines, periods, and research and creative modalities.

This was the first time the HRC had adopted a theme. We did so not to provide an exclusive focus for our activities—the center continued to support research and sponsor events of all kinds—but to create a framework that generated interdisciplinary conversation and collaboration, linked seemingly disparate projects, and provided an animating concept as our center itself underwent significant changes, including new leadership, a new home, a new expanded focus on both humanistic and artistic inquiry, and a new mandate to more actively engage the university community in its entirety.

At the heart of these efforts was a series of lunchtime and afternoon conversations—mostly with Rice faculty but also encompassing visitors from both near and far—that took repair as a hinge to connect ongoing research and pressing contemporary issues. These included a discussion between artists, activists, and scholars just days after the 2024 election on the topic of “Democratic Fragility, Democratic Repair,” and a spring 2025 conversation that brought together former university Presidents and Chancellors Ruth Simmons, Holden Thorpe, and Patricia Oker to discuss “Higher Ed Under Repair.” Pertinent and lively, these events drew large and engaged crowds that cut across university constituencies and together demonstrated the generative power of humanities-driven thinking for grappling with our most urgent cultural concerns.

Amidst ongoing political crisis and intensifying assaults on higher education, these conversations were not just about repair but became, in themselves, sites of restorative community: an opportunity to discuss what is broken and to learn—both from those thinking through the past and those working to shape the future—how we might forge new fixes. Our diverse audiences evinced the need and desire for such conversation: faculty, staff, community members, undergraduate and graduate students, visitors from nearby campuses, and even senior university administrators all came, and discussion was both vibrant and wide-ranging. This focus on outreach was literalized in Repair Station, an interactive public art installation by Julia Gartrell the HRC organized together with the university’s Moody Center for the Arts. Prominently placed on a main conduit for undergraduates making their way between dorm and classroom, the installation incorporated a range of tools and materials—plyers, thread, screwdrivers, buttons, fabric, elastic bands—that could be put to use to mend or reconfigure broken (or maybe not-so-broken) items. Clad in white tile with neon green highlights, the installation announced the importance of reparative thought and labor at the heart of Rice’s campus.

The HRC also organized two keynote talks under the auspices of our Repair theme—featuring poet and critic Maggie Nelson and political theorist Wendy Brown—that were among the School of Humanities and Arts’s best-attended events in years. The keynotes, which respectively discussed the complications of reparative aesthetics and the promise of reparative democracy, were not stand-alone lectures but, in each case, part of a weeklong series of gatherings. These included reading groups that brought together faculty, postdocs, and graduate students as well as student seminars with the keynote visitors before or following their talks. The HRC worked to ensure the thinking-through of repair generated by each visit was broad, deep, and conversational—and continued after the keynote talks, and our theme itself, concluded. Judging from the ongoing statements of enthusiasm we still hear about both visits, these efforts unquestionably paid off.

Center-organized happenings were only one element of our repair theme. Equally important, and just as wide-ranging in their foci, were the multiple faculty and student initiatives supported under its auspices. These included creative projects such as the staging of SPILL, a documentary play by Leigh Fondakowski about the 2010 Deepwater Horizon tragedy told through the words of those who experienced it; academic conferences including the 2025 meeting of the Universities Studying Slavery Consortium, during which participants discussed best practices and guiding principles for truth-telling educational projects focused on human bondage and the legacies of racism in their institutional histories; and workshops such as “Ethnoracial Reparations, Public History, and Memory-Making in Colombia,” an upcoming gathering focused on symbolic reparations and public memory in Colombia. Repair, for such initiatives, functioned as both a motivating prompt and a dialogical engine. Together, the supported projects demonstrated the range of intellectual and creative work being done at Rice and the deep interest of the Humanities Research Center in carrying this work forward.

Looking to 2026, the HRC is excited to inaugurate its new theme of “Critical Futures,” which will run for two years. From our focus on the mitigation of past fractures through ideas and practices of repair, this new theme points unambiguously forward—to the imagination of possible futures from the perspective of a present that remains, despite all our attempted fixes, irredeemably broken.

Graham Bader, Director, Humanities Research Center
Professor of Art History
Rice University