This talk will survey some occurrences of the Stirling numbers, of both kinds, in certain representations of the symmetric group. One instance arose from an examination of subword order and its homology. I will describe ways to compute the homology representation of various subposets using this example.

A second instance comes from recent joint work with Ayah Almousa and Vic Reiner, by considering the Koszul dual of the Whitney homology of the partition lattice.