Global Georgia Public Events Series

The Willson Center’s Global Georgia series brings world class thinkers to Georgia. It presents global problems in local context by addressing pressing contemporary questions, including the economy, society, and the environment, with a focus on how the arts and humanities can intervene. Global Georgia combines the best in contemporary thinking and practice in the arts and humanities with related advances in the sciences and other areas. The series is made possible by the support of private individuals and the Willson Center Board of Friends.

Nabil Ayers

Title: “Nabil Ayers in Conversation with David Barbe”
Date: February 20, 2023
Orkin Hall

Angela Brown

Title: “Opera… from a Sistah’s Point of View”
Date: February 23, 2023
Edge Recital Hall

David Beavan

Title: “Beyond Digital Humanities: Weaving Humanities, Research Software Engineering and AI”
Date: March 15, 2023
Special Collections Auditorium

Jack Davis

Title: Odum Environmental Ethics Lecture – “The Bald Eagle: The History of a Symbol and Species”
Date: March 16, 2023
Jackson St. Building

Paula Krebs

Title: “The Humanities at Work”
Date: March 17, 2023
Delta Innovation Hub

Young Plato

Title: Screening and Conversation
Date: March 20, 2023
Ciné

Kaywin Feldman

Title: “Building a National Collection in a Changing Nation”
Date: March 21, 2023
Georgia Museum of Art

Vincent Carretta

Title: “Recovering the Life of Phillis Wheatley Peters, ‘A WONDER of the Age Indeed!’”
Date: April 3, 2023
Online Event

Peter O’Connor

Title: “Slow Wonder Lights the Slow Fuse of Possibility”
Date: April 18, 2023
Ciné

Joel Robbins

Title: “The Present and the Future in the Present: Religion, Values, and Climate Change”
Date: April 20, 2023
Peabody Hall

Seán Hewitt, Louise Kennedy, and Martin Doyle

Title: Betty Jean Craige Readings and Conversation
Date: April 26, 2023
Morton Theatre

Maboula Soumahoro

Title: “Black Is the Journey, Africana the Name”
Date: January 13, 2022
Ciné

Indigenous Photograph

Title: “Conversation with Native American and First Nations Photographers”
Date: February 3, 2022
Virtual event

Conversation with Creature Comforts Brewing Co. & Bell’s Brewery

Title: “Quality Breweries, Quality Companies”
Date: February 8, 2022
Delta Innovation Hub

Olúfẹmi Táíwò

Title: “Reconsidering Reparations”
Date: February 16, 2022
Virtual event

Symposium on Muslim Women and Comics

Title: “Muslim Women and Comics”
Date: February 22, 2022
Virtual event

Video of the symposium is below:

David Chalmers

Title: “Reality+: From the Matrix to the Metaverse”
Date: March 1, 2022
Delta Innovation Hub

David Chalmers is University Professor of philosophy and neural science and co-director of the Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness at New York University. This lecture was presented in partnership with the department of philosophy.

Chalmers is interested in the philosophy of mind (especially consciousness) and the foundations of cognitive science, physics, and technology, as well as the philosophy of language, metaphysics and epistemology, and many other areas. His latest book, Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy, was published by W.W. Norton (US) and Allen Lane (UK) in January 2022.

Greg Bluestein

Title: “A Conversation with Greg Bluestein, Author of Flipped: How Georgia Turned Purple and Broke the Monopoly on Republican Power“
Date: March 29, 2022
Russell Special Collections Libraries Auditorium

This event was sponsored by the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication in partnership with the School of Public and International Affairs and the Willson Center.

Greg Bluestein is a political reporter who covers state politics for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He also contributes to the Political Insider blog and Jolt newsletter, hosts the Politically Georgia podcast, co-hosts shows on WSB and Georgia Public Broadcasting outlets, and is a frequent guest on local and national TV and radio programs. He is a graduate of the University of Georgia with degrees in journalism and political science. His book Flipped was published in March 2022 by Viking.

Bluestein was joined in conversation by Audrey Haynes, associate professor of political science, Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor, and director of the Applied Politics Certificate Program in the School of Public and International Affairs.

Video of the conversation is below:

Ed Pavlić and Christine Cuomo

Title: “Outward: The Radical Legacies of Adrienne Rich – A Conversation with Ed Pavlić and Christine Cuomo”
Date: March 31, 2022
Athenaeum

Martin Hayes

Title: “An Evening of Irish Music with Martin Hayes”
Date: April 6, 2022
Georgia Museum of Art

Jahan Ramazani

Title: “A Life in Poetry”
Date: April 13, 2022
Virtual Event

Valeria Luiselli

Title: Lost Children Archive
Date: April 13, 2022
Virtual Event

Ryan Emanuel

Title: “On the Swamp: Indigenous Erasure, Environmental Justice, and the Transformation of North Carolina’s Coastal Plain”
Date: April 19, 2022
Virtual Event

Natasha Trethewey

Title: 2021-2022 Delta Visiting Chair for Global Understanding
Date: April 21-22, 2022
Multiple venues

Penn Center Community Conversations

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These two public conversations were presented by Culture and Community at the Penn Center National Historic Landmark District, a partnership initiative of Penn Center – a St. Helena, SC nonprofit organization committed to African American education, community development and social justice – and the Willson Center, funded by a grant from the Mellon Foundation.

Title: “Heirs’ Property: Land, Culture, and Community”
Date: April 11, 2022
Virtual Event

Conversation with Creature Comforts & Sierra Nevada
Brewing Companies

Title: “Diversity, Community, and Sustainability: Sierra Nevada, Creature Comforts and the Commitment to Do Good, Better”
Date: February 3, 2021, 4 pm
Virtual Event

Georgia Museum of Art Virtual Discussion

Title: “Emma Amos: Color Odyssey”
Date: February 4, 2021, 4 pm
Virtual Event

Kevin Day

Composer

Title: Virtual Performance and Discussion: “More than words…”
Date: February 18, 2021, 7 pm
Virtual Event

Carole Emberton

Author and associate professor of history, SUNY Buffalo

Title: “Beyond Redemption: Race, Violence, and the American South after the Civil War”
Date: February 23, 2021, 3 pm
Virtual Event

Closing Event for UGA Press Campus Read

Title: “An Education in Georgia: Looking toward the Future”
Date: February 25, 2021, 4 pm
Virtual Event

Conversation on Athens Hip-Hop Compilation with Producers Montu Miller, Ed Pavlić, & Artists

Title: “Now Is The Time – Shouting Fire in a Crowded Theater”
Date: February 25, 2021 7 pm
Virtual Event

Now Is The Time: Shouting Fire in a Crowded Theater is a compilation album of Athens, Georgia, hip-hop artists assembled by executive producers Montu Miller and Ed Pavlić. This conversation is the third and final event in the series DJ Summits in the Global South, a Willson Center Global Georgia Initiative research project programmed by Pavlić and supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Moderated by Pavlić, Distinguished Research Professor of English, African American Studies, and Creative Writing, the conversation brings together two contributors to the album – artist LB and artist and engineer Caulfield – along with Miller, co-owner of ATHfactor-Liberty Entertainment, a full-service representation, promotion, and production company based in Athens.

About the album: Now Is The Time: Shouting Fire in a Crowded Theater is a music project created to react to America’s current climate. It is contemporary protest music that will help be the catalyst of some of the change that needs to happen now. The time to act is now as America is on fire with generational poverty, racial divide, political complacency, and countless other issues. This eight-song compilation consists of 13 Hip-Hop artists, two poets, and six producers based in Athens, where the core of these issues runs rampant. Want to know what some of American’s daughters and sons have to say about these issues plaguing America? Now Is The Time: Shouting Fire in a Crowded Theater addresses many of them with an unapologetic, direct attitude. This project is presented by ATHfactor-Liberty Entertainment (ALE) with support from the Willson Center through a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Video of the conversation is below.

Morton Theatre Corp. Community Conversation

Title: “Conversation: Morton Theatre Corporation Defiance Project Awards”
Date: March 2, 2021, 4 pm
Virtual Event

Helon Habila

Author

Title: “Searching for Home: Africans in Europe”
Date: March 4, 2021, 4 pm
Virtual Event

Joy Harjo & LeAnne Howe

 Poets and authors

Title: Reading and Conversation
Date: March 10, 2021 4 pm
Virtual Event

Poets Joy Harjo and LeAnne Howe share a conversation and read from their work in this event presented by the Institute of Native American Studies and the Willson Center, in partnership with the department of English and the Creative Writing Program. The event is part of UGA’s Signature Lectures series.

Harjo is the 23rd Poet Laureate of the United States. An internationally renowned performer and writer of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, she is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Board of Directors Chair of the Native Arts & Cultures Foundation, and holds a Tulsa Artist Fellowship.

Howe, a poet, fiction writer, filmmaker, and playwright, was born and raised in Oklahoma and is a member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. She is the Eidson Distinguished Professor in American Literature in the UGA department of English.

Video of the conversation is below.

Megha Majumdar

Author

Title: “Writing Socially Engaged Fiction”
Date: March 18, 2021, 4 pm
Virtual Event

Jee Leong Koh

Poet and publisher

Title: “Translation as a Literary Trope”
Date: March 25, 2021, 4:30 pm
Virtual Event

Conversation with Liza Stepanova and artists from her album E Pluribus Unum

Title: “E Pluribus Unum: Reflections on Immigration in America in Music and Visual Art”
Date: April 7, 2021, 7 pm
Virtual Event

Renee Gladman & Val Jeanty

Composer, percussionist and DJ; Writer and artist 

Title: “Conjurations: Composing at the Intersections of Sound, Line, and Language”
Date: April 20, 2021 7 pm
Virtual Event

Composer, percussionist and DJ Val Jeanty and author and artist Renee Gladman take part in a discussion moderated by Nicholas Allen, who holds an endowed Professorship in the Humanities and is director of the Willson Center. Also participating in the conversation is writer Christina Wood Martinez, PhD student and instructor in the UGA department of English.

The event is presented in partnership with the Institute for African American Studies, the department of English, and the Creative Writing Program.

Gladman and Jeanty discuss their plans for a collaborative creative project that they will undertake throughout 2021, supported by the Willson Center.

Val Jeanty is a Haitian-born New Yorker whose musical practice combines modern electronic and traditional acoustic instruments for improvised performances and installations she refers to as “Afro-Electronica.”

Renee Gladman is a writer and artist preoccupied with lines, crossings, thresholds, and geographies as they play out in the interstices of poetry and prose. She is the author of eleven published works, including a cycle of novels about the city-state Ravicka and its inhabitants, the Ravickians. Gladman was recently awarded a 2021 Windham Campbell Prize in fiction.

Earth Day conversation with photographers Tomiko Jones, Jeff Rich, and Marni Shindelman

Title: “Land, Water, Sky: Photographers Address the Environment on Earth Day 2021”
Date: April 22, 2021 4 pm
Virtual Event

Photographers Tomiko Jones, Jeff Rich, and Marni Shindelman join moderator Katie Geha, director of the Dodd Galleries at the Lamar Dodd School of Art, for a conversation on the occasion of Earth Day 2021, on the heels of a year that has reshaped discourses on countless levels of global society. They will discuss the interaction of their art with the environment, and how their work connects to issues from politics and technology to communication and memory.

This conversation is presented as part of the 2021 Global Georgia Initiative public events series of the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts, in partnership with the Lamar Dodd School of Art, the Dodd Galleries, and the Office of Sustainability. The event is also part of the university’s Earth Day 2021 Calendar.

Video of the conversation is below.

Conversation with Creature Comforts and Allagash
Brewing Companies

Title: “Tapping into Community: Craft, Culture, and Innovation”
Date: January 8, 2020 4 pm
Location: Studio 225

Val Jeanty and Ashon Crawley

Composer, percussionist, DJ; Author

Title: Performance and Conversation
Date: February 13, 2020 6 pm
Location: Ciné

Composer, percussionist, and DJ Val Jeanty will take part in a conversation with Ashon Crawley, associate professor of religious studies and African American and African studies at the University of Virginia, at 6 p.m. followed by a performance at 7 p.m.

Jeanty is a Haitian-born composer, percussionist, and turntablist who uses technology to lead listeners into her dream-like, expressionist Afro-Electronica compositions. She incorporates her African/Haitian musical traditions into the present and beyond, combining acoustics with electronics, and the archaic with the postmodern.

Crawley’s research and teaching experiences are in the areas of Black studies, performance theory and sound studies, philosophy and theology, and Black feminist and queer theories. He is the author of Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility (Fordham University Press, 2016) and the forthcoming The Lonely Letters (Duke University Press, spring 2020).

Part of DJ Summits in the Global South, a Global Georgia Initiative research project supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Presented in partnership with the Institute for African American Studies and the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Institute.

Lawrence Wright

Author, journalist, screenwriter, playwright

Title: “The Future of Terrorism”
Date: February 27, 2020 4 pm
Location: UGA Chapel

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Lawrence Wright’s talk is the department of history’s Ferdinand Phinizy Lecture. It is also presented as part of the Global Georgia Initiative of the Willson Center, and in partnership with the School for Public and International Affairs and the Center for International Trade and Security.

Wright is an author, screenwriter, playwright, and a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction for The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (2006), which spent eight weeks on The New York Times bestseller list and has been translated into twenty-five languages. Time magazine pronounced it one of the 100 best nonfiction books ever written. Among his other books are Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief (2013), The Terror Years: From Al-Qaeda to the Islamic State (2016), and God Save Texas: A Journey into the Soul of the Lone Star State (2018).

Jeff VanderMeer

Author

Title: “An Evening with Jeff VanderMeer”
Date: February 14, 2019 7 pm
Location: Seney-Stovall Chapel

Jeff VanderMeer’s best known fiction is the New York Times-bestselling Southern Reach trilogy (Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance), which won the Shirley Jackson Award and Nebula Award. The trilogy made over 30 year’s best lists, including Entertainment Weekly’s top 10, and prompted the New Yorker to call the author “the weird Thoreau.” The trilogy has been acquired by publishers in 28 other countries, with Paramount Pictures acquiring the movie rights. The film version of Annihilation starred Natalie Portman and was released in 2018.

VanderMeer’s nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, the Washington Post, Atlantic.com, and the Los Angeles Times. He has taught at the Yale Writers’ Conference and the Miami International Book Fair, and lectured at MIT, Brown, and the Library of Congress. His most recent novel from Farrar, Straus and Giroux is titled Borne. He lives in Tallahassee, Florida, with his wife, the noted editor Ann VanderMeer.

Stephanie McCurry

Professor of American History, Columbia University

Title: “Reconstructing: A Georgia Woman’s Life Amidst the Ruins”
Date: February 22, 2019 5:30 pm
Location: Seney-Stovall Chapel

Stephanie McCurry is R. Gordon Hoxie Professor of American History in Honor of Dwight D. Eisenhower at Columbia University. She specializes in the nineteenth century United States, the American South, the American Civil War and the history of women and gender. Her current interests include the history of the United States in the immediate post-Civil War moment, the history of postwar societies and processes of reconstruction in the 19th and 20th centuries, and the matter of marriage, politics and the state in the modern period.

McCurry is the author of Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country (1995) and Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South, (2010), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for history.

Her visit is presented in partnership with the department of history.

Christo Doherty

Photographer and Video Artist

Title: “Moving Statues: A Conversation of the Global South”
Date: April 10, 2019 6 pm
Location: Georgia Museum of Art Griffith Auditorium

Christo Doherty is a photographer and video artist who has held solo exhibitions of his work in South Africa and Europe. He is an associate professor and deputy head of the Wits School of Arts of the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.

Doherty will give a presentation based on his recent research and photographs concerned with the removal of statues and monuments from South Africa’s apartheid era, followed by a conversation with American scholars whose work has explored related issues in the United States.

NoViolet Bulawayo – Betty Jean Craige Annual Lecture

Author and Professor of English, Stanford University

Title: “The Immigrant Experience in America”
Date: April 15, 2019 4 pm
Location: UGA Chapel

NoViolet Bulawayo grew up in Zimbabwe. She earned her MFA from Cornell University, where she was a recipient of the Truman Capote Fellowship, and has also held fellowships at Princeton, Harvard, and Stanford, where she now teaches fiction. Bulawayo’s debut novel, We Need New Names, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and The Guardian’s First Book Award, was named a New York Times Notable Book, and won the PEN/Hemingway Prize, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and many other honors. Bulawayo’s short story “Hitting Budapest,” which became the first chapter of We Need New Names, won the 2011 Caine Prize for African Writing, sometimes called the African Booker.

Bulawayo’s talk is the department of comparative literature’s annual Betty Jean Craige Lecture. Betty Jean Craige is University Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature and a former director of the Willson Center.

The event is presented in partnership with the department of comparative literature, the African Studies Institute, the Institute for African American Studies, and the Institute for Women’s Studies.

Barry Lopez – The Georgia Review Earth Day Lecture & Odum Environmental Ethics Lecture

Author and environmentalist

Title: “What Horizons Next?””
Date: April 22, 2019, 7 pm
Location: Georgia State Botanical Garden Conservatory

Barry Lopez is an essayist, author, and short-story writer, and has traveled extensively in remote and populated parts of the world.

He is the author of Arctic Dreams, for which he received the National Book Award; Of Wolves and Men, a National Book Award finalist, for which he received the John Burroughs and Christopher medals; and eight works of fiction, including Light Action in the Caribbean, Field Notes, and Resistance. His essays are collected in two books, Crossing Open Ground and About This Life.

His most recent books are Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape (2006), a reader’s dictionary of regional landscape terms, which he edited with Debra Gwartney, and Outside (2015), a collection of six stories with engravings by Barry Moser. His new book, Horizon, will be published in March 2019 by Penguin Random House.

Qiu Xiaolong – Betty Jean Craige Lecture in Comparative Literature

Author

Title: “A Chinese Cop in the Global Age” – Betty Jean Craige Annual Lecture in Comparative Literature
Date: February 8, 4 pm
Location: Richard B. Russell Building Special Collections Libraries Auditorium

Qiu Xiaolong was born in Shanghai, China. He published prize-winning poetry, translation and criticism in Chinese in the eighties, and became a member of the Chinese Writers’ Association. In 1988, he came to the United States as a Ford Foundation Fellow, started writing in English, and obtained a Ph.D. in comparative literature at Washington University. 

The event will include readings by Qiu and a conversation with Nicholas Allen, Franklin Professor of English and director of the Willson Center. It is presented as the Department of Comparative Literature’s annual Betty Jean Craige Lecture. Betty Jean Craige is University Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature and a former director of the Willson Center.

Kishi Bashi

Musician and filmmaker

Title: “A Conversation on the Japanese Incarceration Through Song and Film”
Date: February 15, 8 pm
Location: Seney-Stovall Chapel

The acclaimed violinist Kishi Bashi will present a multimedia event built around Omoiyari, his film and song project exploring the history and legacy of Japanese incarceration in the United States during World War II. He will be joined by collaborators Julian Saporiti and Erin Aoyama, musicians and graduate student researchers in American studies at Brown University, as well as by a string quartet. Following the music, film, and spoken word performance, John Morrow, professor of history at the University of Georgia, will moderate a panel discussion with Kishi Bashi, Saporiti, and Aoyama.

Willson Center / Grady College Conversation

Journalists’ Panel

Title: “Journalism and the Contemporary South”
Date: February 22, 4 pm
Location: UGA Chapel

Join us for a conversation on journalism in the contemporary South with six panelists with national experience in the modern media and the challenges they face in telling the stories that speak to a tumultuous time.

• Eliza Borné, editor, Oxford American
• Valerie Boyd, professor, UGA Grady College of Journalism
• Richard Fausset, Atlanta bureau chief, The New York Times
• Alysia Nicole Harris, editor, Scalawag
• Pete McCommons, editor & publisher, Flagpole
• Chuck Reece, editor in chief, The Bitter Southerner

Dean Charles Davis of the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication will moderate the discussion.

Robert Spano

Artistic Director, Atlanta Symphony Orchestra

Title: “Conversation with Student Composers: Experimentation, Preparation, and Performance”
Date: March 23, 2018, 12:30 pm
Location: Edge Recital Hall, Hugh Hodgson School of Music

Robert Spano, artistic director of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, will visit UGA for a day of events supported by the President’s Venture Fund, the Hugh Hodgson School of Music, and the Willson Center.

Spano and the ASO will take part in the UGA-Atlanta Symphony Composers Workshop in Hodgson Hall from 1:30-4 p.m., in which the symphony, conducted by Spano, will read and rehearse orchestral compositions by UGA student composers. Works were selected through a call-for-scores competition among UGA students.

The reading session will be preceded by a panel discussion with Spano and the selected composers, moderated by Peter Van Zandt Lane, assistant professor of composition in the Hodgson School and director of the Roger and Phylis Dancz Center for New Music, in Edge Hall from 12:30-1:15 p.m. The discussion is an event in the Willson Center’s 2018 Global Georgia Initiative.

Sinéad Morrissey

Poet

Title: Reading
Date: April 4, 7 pm
Location: Seney-Stovall Chapel – 200 N Milledge Ave. Athens, GA 30601

Sinéad Morrissey was born in Northern Ireland in 1972 and grew up in Belfast. As an undergraduate, she studied English and German at Trinity College, Dublin, and went on to gain a PhD in eighteenth-century literature.

Morrissey served as Belfast’s inaugural Poet Laureate (2013-2014), undertaking an extensive program of poetry workshops in schools, prisons, and other community settings. In 2016, Parallax was selected as the most important Irish artwork of any genre for the year 2013 in Modern Ireland in 100 Artworks, edited by Fintan O’Toole.

Demain (Tomorrow) – Screening and Panel Discussion

Screening and Discussion

Screening: “Demain (Tomorrow)”
Date: January 11, 8 pm
Location: Ciné – 234 W Hancock Ave, Athens, GA 30601, USA
Cost: $5 GENERAL or FREE for Cine Members and Students with valid ID

Ciné will host a special one-night only presentation of Demain (Tomorrow), winner of France’s 2016 César Award for Best Documentary. The screening will be preceded by a public reception and followed by a panel discussion. The event is sponsored by the Consulat Général de France à Atlanta, the UGA French Program, UGA Film Studies, and the Willson Center as part of the 2017 Global Georgia Initiative.

A reception catered by The National and Trader Joe’s will begin at 7 p.m. prior to the 8 p.m. screening, which in turn will be followed by a panel discussion with UGA faculty involved in environmental studies: Professors Nik Heynen, Geography, Gene M. Pesti, Poultry Sciences, and Patricia Yager, Marine Science. The panel will be moderated by Richard Neupert, Film Studies.

The film follows a team of young people as they explore the world in search of solutions to the world’s most pressing social, economic and environmental issues. According to La Nouvelle Observateur, “Demain is incredibly pertinent because it demonstrates that all the positive, important initiatives covered in this film have a common thread: They privilege the local investment by engaged citizens in small-scale projects that matter for all of us.”

Alonzo King

Founder and choreographer, LINES Ballet

Title: “A life in Art”
Date: January 17, 11 am
Location: New Dance Theatre

LINES Ballet Performance
Date: January 17, 8 pm
Location: Fine Arts Theatre

Choreographer Alonzo King and his LINES Ballet company will visit the University of Georgia and Athens for a series of events Jan. 15-18, including a lecture by King for the Global Georgia Initiative of the Willson Center and a performance by the company presented by the UGA Performing Arts Center.

King’s Global Georgia talk, “A Life in Art,” will be Jan. 17 at 11 a.m. in the New Dance Theatre in the Dance Building. LINES Ballet will perform Jan. 17 at 8 p.m. in the Fine Arts Theatre. A pre-concert lecture will be offered 45 minutes prior to the performance in the Fine Arts Building Balcony Theatre.

Tickets for the Fine Arts Theatre performance are $41 to $52 and can be purchased at the Performing Arts Center, online at pac.uga.edu or by calling the box office at 706-542-4400 or toll free at 888-289-8497. UGA students can purchase tickets for $6 with a valid UGA ID, limit one ticket per student. All other events are free and open to the public.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Author

Title: “Nothing Ever Dies: Ethical Memory and Radical Writing in The Sympathizer” – Betty Jean Craige Annual Lecture in Comparative Literature
Date: February 13, 4 pm
Location: UGA Chapel

Title: “Vietnam/War/Memory/Justice: A Conversation with Viet Thanh Nguyen”
Date: February 14, 4 pm
Location: Dean Rusk International Law Center

Viet Thanh Nguyen is a winner of a Pulitzer Prize for his 2015 novel The Sympathizer. His follow-up, 2016’s Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War, was shortlisted for a National Book Award in nonfiction. A collection of short stories, The Refugees, will be published in February 2017.

Nguyen will visit UGA for a February 13 talk in the Willson Center’s Global Georgia Initiative speaker series, as well as a public conversation hosted by the Dean Rusk International Law Center on February 14.

“Vietnam/War/Memory/Justice: A Conversation with Viet Thanh Nguyen” will be held at 4 p.m. February 14 in the Larry Walker Room on the 4th floor of Dean Rusk Hall. Joining him will be Tiana S. Mykkeltvedt, a Georgia Law alumna and partner at the Atlanta law firm Bondurant Mixson & Elmore who was flown out of  Vietnam as an orphan in April 1975, and Rusk Center Director Diane Marie Amann, Associate Dean for International Programs & Strategic Initiatives and Emily & Ernest Woodruff Chair in International Law at Georgia Law, who also serves as the International Criminal Court Prosecutor’s Special Adviser on Children in & affected by Armed Conflict.

Nguyen’s visit is co-sponsored by the Department of Comparative Literature, the Dean Rusk Center for International Law, the President’s Venture Fund, the Office of the Dean of the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, the Office of International Education, and the Georgia Asian Pacific American Bar Association.

Seed Life Skills Symposium

Student Cooking Competition and Panel Discussion

Title: “Food, Culture, and Community”
Date: February 22
Location: Multiple Venues
Cost: Seed Life Skills Benefit Dinner $100; all other events FREE

The Willson Center and Seed Life Skills present a symposium on “Food, Culture, and Community” with multiple public events on February 22 as part of the Willson Center’s 2017 Global Georgia Initiative.

Seed Life Skills is a nonprofit, research-based curriculum founded by Chef Hugh Acheson that is dedicated to providing young people with essential knowledge and skills in family and consumer sciences, also known as home economics.

The symposium is presented in partnership with Five & Ten, Creature Comforts, The Bitter Southerner, the Clarke County School District, Family Connection-Communities in Schools, the University of Georgia Press, the College of Family and Consumer Sciences, and the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Institute.

See “Read More” below for the Program of Events

500 Years – Screening with director Pamela Yates and producer Paco de Onis

Screening and Discussion

Title: “500 Years”
Date: March 2, 7 pm
Location: Ciné – 234 W Hancock Ave, Athens, GA 30601, USA

The Sundance-selected 2017 documentary 500 Years continues the story of the Guatemalan indigenous Mayan peoples’ human rights struggle that began in director Pamela Yates’s earlier films When the Mountains Tremble (1983) and Granito: How to Nail a Dictator (2011). Yates and Paco de Onís, producer of 500 Years and Granito, will take part in a discussion following the screening.

The event, part of the Willson Center’s 2017 Global Georgia Initiative, is presented in partnership with the IntLawGrrls blog, the School of Law’s Georgia Women in Law Lead initiative, the Institute of Native American Studies, the Women Law Students Association and International Law Society, the American Society of International Law and its Women in International Law Interest Group, and the Planethood Foundation.

Natalie Chanin

Business owner and designer

Title: “Alabama Chanin: Design, Making, and Meaning”
Date: January 29, 5 pm
Location: UGA Chapel

Natalie “Alabama” Chanin is the owner and designer of Alabama Chanin. She has a degree in Environmental Design with a focus on industrial and craft-based textiles from North Carolina State University. After graduation, Natalie worked in the junior sportswear industry on New York’s Seventh Avenue, before moving abroad. For over a decade, Natalie worked as a stylist and costume designer, travelling the globe. In 2000, Chanin returned to her home to begin the sustainable work that has become Alabama Chanin.

Assaf Gavron

Author and translator

Title: “The Hilltop: An Israeli Author’s Perspective” – Betty Jean Craige Lecture
Date: February 4, 2016, 4 pm
Location: UGA Chapel

Assaf Gavron is a writer and translator. He grew up in Jerusalem, studied in London and Vancouver, and lives in Tel Aviv. He has published five novels, a collection of stories, and a collection of Jerusalem falafel reviews. Among the numerous international awards he has won are the Prix Courrier International in France, Buch fur die Stadt in Germany, the DAAD artists-in-Berlin residency, and the Bernstein Prize in Israel. His fiction has been translated into ten languages, adapted to the stage, and four of his books are optioned for films.

Mark Sanders

Professor of African American Studies

Title: “Blackness and Nationality: The Case of Ricardo Batrell and the Cuban Racial Narrative”
Date: February 11, 4pm
Location: UGA Chapel

Mark Sanders is Professor of African American Studies and English at Emory University. He specializes in early twentieth-century American and African American literature and culture, more specifically, the connections between “mainstream” American modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. His research interests also include American and African American poetics, race theory, the African American novel, African American autobiography, and Afro-Cuban and Afro-Latino literature and culture. Professor Sanders teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first century African American literature and culture, exploring issues of racial and cultural identity, citizenship, and freedom. He also teaches courses on Afro-Cuban literature and culture of the colonial, republican, and revolutionary eras.

William R. Ferris

Professor of History

Title: “The Storied South: Voices of Writers and Artists”
Date: February 18, 4pm
Location: Griffith Auditorium, Georgia Museum of Art

William R. Ferris, a widely recognized leader in Southern studies, African American music, and folklore, is the Joel R. Williamson Eminent Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the senior associate director of UNC’s Center for the Study of the American South. The former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Ferris has conducted thousands of interviews with musicians ranging from the famous (B.B. King) to the unrecognized (Parchman Penitentiary inmates working in the fields). He has written or edited 10 books and created 15 documentary films. He co-edited the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture (1989), which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. His most recent book is The Storied South: Voices of the Writers and Artists (2013). Bill Ferris’ films include Mississippi Blues (1983), which was featured at the Cannes Film Festival. He has produced numerous sound recordings and hosted “Highway 61,” a weekly blues program on Mississippi Public Radio for nearly a decade. He also has published his own poetry and short stories.

Sven Beckert

Author and historian

Title: “Empire of Cotton: The Global Origins of Modern Capitalism”
Date: February 25, 4pm
Location: UGA Chapel

Sven Beckert, Laird Bell Professor of History at Harvard University, researches and teaches the history of the United States in the nineteenth century, with a particular emphasis on the history of capitalism, including its economic, social, political and transnational dimensions. His recent book, Empire of Cotton: A Global History, was winner of the Bancroft Prize and selected as a Pulitzer Prize Finalist.

Beckert’s talk is part of the Willson Center’s Global Georgia Initiative, which brings world class thinkers to Georgia. It presents global problems in local context by addressing pressing contemporary questions, including the economy, society, and the environment, with a focus on how the arts and humanities can intervene. Global Georgia combines the best contemporary thinking and practice in the arts and humanities with related advances in the sciences and other areas.

Paul Sutter

Environmental Historian

Title: “Let Us Now Praise Famous Gullies: Providence Canyon and the Soils of the South”
Date: March 24, 5pm
Location: Athens Cine

Paul Sutter is Associate Professor of History and a Faculty Affiliate in Environmental Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Kansas in 1997, and he was a member of the History Department at the University of Georgia from 2000-2009.

Sutter is the author of Driven Wild: How the Fight against Automobiles Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement (University of Washington Press, 2002) and Let Us Now Praise Famous Gullies: Providence Canyon and the Soils of the South (University of Georgia Press, 2015); he is co-author of The Art of Managing Longleaf: A Personal History of the Stoddard-Neel Approach (University of Georgia Press, 2010), and co-editor of Environmental History and the American South: A Reader (University of Georgia Press, 2009).

Loung Ung

Author, human rights activist

Title: “First They Killed My Father,” Betty Jean Craige Annual Lecture
Date: January 29, 4 pm
Location: Rusk Hall, Larry Walker Room, 4th Floor

Loung Ung is an author and human rights activist dedicated to promoting equality, human rights, and justice in her native country, Cambodia, and worldwide. Her talk is presented in partnership with the Department of Comparative Literature.

Paul Seawright

Photographer, head of Belfast School of Art

Title: “Things Left Unsaid”
Date: February 5, 4 pm
Location: Georgia Museum of Art, Griffith Auditorium

Paul Seawright is Professor of Photography and Head of Belfast School of Art at the University of Ulster. His talk, “Things Left Unsaid,” will be delivered in partnership with the Lamar Dodd School of Art.

Ann Powers with Patterson Hood

NPR music critic and correspondent; Drive-By Truckers

Title: “Our Back Pages: The Music, Books and Movies That Fed Two Creative Lives”
Date: February 12, 4 pm
Location: UGA Chapel

Ann Powers is NPR Music’s critic and correspondent. One of the nation’s most notable music critics, Powers has been writing for The Record, NPR’s blog about finding, making, buying, sharing and talking about music, since April 2011. Powers served as chief pop music critic at the Los Angeles Times from 2006 until she joined NPR. Prior to the Los Angeles Times, she was senior critic atBlender and senior curator at Experience Music Project. From 1997 to 2001 Powers was a pop critic at The New York Times and before that worked as a senior editor at the Village Voice. Powers began her career working as an editor and columnist at San Francisco Weekly.

Randy Borman

Conservationist, Chief of Ecuadorian Cofan tribe

Title: “An Amazon Contribution to Global Survival”
Date: February 19, 4 pm
Location: UGA Chapel

Randy Borman is a conservationist and Chief of the Ecuadorian Cofan tribe. The Cofan people are a small indigenous group of about 1200 people in northeastern Ecuador and southeastern Colombia. The rain forest provides most resources necessary to maintain their subsistence lifestyle. Borman’s parents arrived in Ecuador in the 1950’s as missionaries, and Borman was raised among the Cofan people. Oil companies began drilling in the region in the 1960’s, and towns appeared around the oil activity. These events interrupted the Cofan people’s way of life, and they began resisting further expansion into the rain forest. Today Borman and the Cofan people advocate for the protection of the rain forest. Through partnerships with the Ecuadorian government and other indigenous peoples, they seek to raise awareness around the world of the importance of preserving natural resources.

John T. Edge

Writer, Southern Foodways Alliance director

Title: “Grits, Greens, and Gochujang: The Emergence of a Newer Southern Cuisine”
Date: February 27, 4 pm
Location: UGA Chapel

John T. Edge is a writer and the director of the Southern Foodways Alliance, an institute of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi, where he documents, studies, and celebrates the diverse food cultures of the American South. On February 27 at 4pm, Edge will give his talk, “Grits, Greens, and Gochujang: The Emergence of a Newer Southern Cuisine,” in the UGA Chapel. His visit to the University of Georgia is presented in partnership with the University of Georgia Press.

Karima Bennoune

Author, legal scholar

Date: November 15, 4 pm
Location: The Chapel

Karima Bennoune is professor of law at the University of California–Davis. Her talk is derived from her new book, Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here: Untold Stories from the Fight Against Muslim Fundamentalism.

Bennoune’s appearance is a special presentation of the Global Georgia Initiative for UGA’s annual Spotlight on the Arts festival. It is co-sponsored by the University of Georgia School of Law, the Dean Rusk Center for International Law and Policy, the International Law Students Association, the UGA African Studies Institute, and the Georgia Society of International and Comparative Law.

Tania León

Composer, conductor, educator

Title: “Border Crossings: Cultural Thresholds in the Syncretic Evolution of Music”
Date: January 30, 4 pm
Location: The Chapel

Introduction by Susan Thomas, Associate Professor, Hugh Hodgson School of Music and co-director, Athens Music Project, a Willson Center Faculty Research Cluster

Tania León is highly regarded as a composer and conductor and recognized for her accomplishments as an educator and advisor to arts organizations. She has been profiled on ABC, CBS, CNN, PBS, Univision, Telemundo, and in independent films. She was born in Havana, Cuba and lives in New York City.

Pete McCommons

Editor and publisher, Flagpole magazine

Title: “The Stuff of Journalism: Death, Kudzu, and the Unexamined Life”
Date: February 6, 4 pm
Location: The Chapel

Introduction by James C. Cobb, B. Phinizy Spalding Distinguished Professor in the History of the American South

Pete McCommons is editor and publisher of Flagpole magazine and has been involved in weekly journalism in Athens for most of the last 40 years, beginning as co-founder of The Athens Observer.

Paul Pressly

Author, historian, educator

Title: “Colonial Georgia: Caribbean Influences and the British Atlantic World”
Date: February 20, 4 pm
Location: The Chapel

Introduction by Lisa Bayer, Director, University of Georgia Press

Dr. Paul Pressly is Director of the Ossabaw Island Education Alliance, a partnership between the Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia, the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, and the Ossabaw Island Foundation, and author of Georgia and the British Atlantic: Caribbean Roots, 1750-1775 (University of Georgia Press, 2013). Dr. Pressly is a former Rhodes scholar and earned a D. Phil. from Oxford University, an M.P.A. from Harvard, and a B.A. from Princeton. Dr. Pressly is former Headmaster at the Savannah Country Day School and taught at the Webb School in Knoxville, Tennessee. He has won a Georgia Governor’s Award in the Humanities and is an expert on Savannah’s role in the British Atlantic world.

Xiaolu Guo

Author, filmmaker

Film: UFO in Her Eyes, screening & discussion
Date: February 27, 7 pm
Location: Ciné

Post-screening discussion with Antje Ascheid, Associate Professor, Department of Theatre and Film Studies and Willson Center Associate Academic Director for Arts and Public Programs, and Andrew Zawacki, Associate Professor of English and Director, Creative Writing Program

Lecture: “Beyond Chinamerica”
Date: February 28, 4 pm
Location: Zell B. Miller Learning Center, Rm. 148

Xiaolu Guo was born in a fishing village in south China. She studied film at the Beijing Film Academy and published six books in China before she moved to London in 2002. The English translation of Village of Stone was shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and nominated for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Her first novel written in English, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers was shortlisted for the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction, and 20 Fragments of a Ravenous Youth, published in 2008, was longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize. Xiaolu’s film career continues to flourish; her feature, She, A Chinese, was released in 2009 and her documentary Once Upon a Time Proletarian has been screened at international film festivals. In 2013 she was named as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists.

Nathalie Handal

Poet, playwright, editor, theatre & film writer/director/producer

Date: March 18, 7 pm
Location: Ciné

Introduction and discussion with Ed Pavlić, Professor of English

Nathalie Handal is an award-winning poet, playwright, and editor. She has lived in Europe, the United States, the Caribbean, Latin America and the Arab world.

James C. Cobb

B. Phinizy Spalding Distinguished Professor in the History of the American South
University of Georgia

Title: “De-Mystifying Dixie: Southern History and Culture in Global Perspective”
Date: January 29, 4 pm
Location: The Chapel

James C. Cobb is widely recognized as one of the foremost scholars of Southern history and culture—and among the first to write broadly about the South in a global context. Cobb has written more than 40 articles and 12 books, mostly about the impact of changing economic conditions on the South. Two of these, Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity and The Most Southern Place on Earth, his book about the Mississippi Delta, are considered classics in the field. The latter quickly became a model for studying other regional cultures and subcultures, such as those of Appalachia and New England.

Barry C. Smith

Director, Institute of Philosophy
School of Advanced Study
University of London

Title: “Coming to Our Senses, Anew”
Date: February 5, 2013
Location:  The Chapel

Barry C. Smith is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Institute of Philosophy in the School of Advanced Study, University of London, where he co-directs the Centre for the Study of the Senses. He has written mostly on the philosophy of mind and language, on the topics of self-knowledge and our knowledge of language. He co-edited The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Language (2006) with Ernest Lepore. Following his 2007 collection, Questions of Taste – The Philosophy of Wine (Oxford University Press), he began working with psychologists, neurologists and neuroscientists on flavor perception and is now the co-organizer of an international research project on the Nature of Taste, jointly run by the University of London and NYU. He has been a Visiting Professor at the University of California at Berkeley and at the Ecole Normale Supèriere, and was the writer and presenter of the BBC World Service radio series, The Mysteries of the Brain.

Introduction by David Lee, UGA Vice President for Research.

John Lowe

Barbara Lester Methvin Distinguished Professor of English
University of Georgia

Title: “The Tropical Sublime in the 19th Century CircumCaribbean”
Date: February 12, 5:30 pm
Location: Ciné, 234 W. Hancock, Athens

John Lowe, recipient of the MELUS Lifetime Achievement Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Field of Ethnic American Literatures, was Robert Penn Warren Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Founding Director of the Program in Louisiana and Caribbean Studies at Louisiana State University. He has authored and edited numerous books in Ethnic American and Southern literature, published dozens of essays, and presented over 80 papers in North America, Europe, and Asia, including invited lectures at the Sorbonne, the University of Paris VI, Venice, Kiel, Munich, Dresden, Budapest, and Hyderabad.

Introduction by Richard Gordon, Director, Latin American and Caribbean Studies Institute, UGA.

Bertis Downs

Entertainment lawyer and adjunct professor, actively retired
R.E.M. advisor since earliest times

Title: “Bertis Downs in Conversation: Don’t Get Me Started – on Athens, music lessons, and of course, good schools for all kids…”

Date:  February 18, 2013, 4 pm
Location:  The Chapel

Since graduating from Davidson College in 1978, Bertis Downs has lived in Athens, Georgia, where he received his law degree in 1981 from the University of Georgia’s School of Law.  He represented the band R.E.M. throughout the band’s illustrious thirty-year career and remains an advisor to the group’s various business endeavors even after its disbandment in 2011.

Ntone Edjabe

Writer, journalist and DJ
Founding editor of Chimurenga magazine

Title: “Diagnosing the Chimurenga Chronic”
Date: February 26, 2013, 4pm
Location:  The Chapel

Ntone Edjabe is a DJ, critic, and the founder and editor of Chimurenga magazine, a pan-African publication of writing, art and politics based in Cape Town, South Africa.

Edjabe’s Feb. 26 lecture will be followed by a DJ session that evening at the 40 Watt, 285 W, Washington St. in downtown Athens.

Edjabe was profiled in a June segment of CNN’s “African Voices” – article and video clips available here.

Introduction by Akinloye Ojo, Director, African Studies Institute, UGA.

Valerie Babb

Professor of English and of African American Studies
Director, Institute for African American Studies 
University of Georgia

Title: “In the Footfalls of Diaspora: Reflections on the Wanderer”
Date: March 5, 5:30 pm
Location: Ciné, 234 W. Hancock, Athens

Valerie Babb is Professor of English and of African American Studies, as well as Director of the Institute for African American Studies, at the University of Georgia. She received her Ph.D. and M.A. from the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, her B.A. at Queens College, The City University of New York. She has been a professor at Georgetown University and is a faculty member of the Bread Loaf School of English, Middlebury College.

Ambassador James A. Joseph

Title: “Leadership as a Way of Being: Reflections on Nelson Mandela, Servant Leadership and Personal Renewal”
Date: May 16, 4 pm
Location: The Chapel

James A. Joseph has served in the administrations of four U.S. Presidents. He was U.S. Ambassador to South Africa from 1995–1999, the only holder of that office to present his credentials to President Nelson Mandela. In 1999, President Thabo Mbeki awarded Joseph the Order of Good Hope, the highest honor the Republic of South Africa bestows on a citizen of another country. He is currently Professor of the Practice of Public Policy Studies at Duke University and executive director of the United States – Southern Africa Center for Leadership and Public Values at Duke and the University of Cape Town.

Ambassador Joseph’s talk is presented in partnership with the J.W. Fanning Institute for Leadership Development, which organized his visit to UGA.