Violence erupted on the mountains of Sinjar during Matthew Barber’s research visit to the Dohuk region of northern Iraq. In response, Barber has turned his attention to documenting the Yazidi refugee crisis in a number of international media outlets.

In its first three years, the Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry has made possible everything from a conference featuring the world’s leading cartoonists in dialogue with each other and a cross-section of faculty; to a monthlong alternate reality game involving students, a professor of English and an experimental phenomenologist from Montreal; to a yearlong collaborative exploration of low-level light undertaken by a distinguished physicist and an award-winning architect.