The Willson Center is a showcase for faculty innovation and achievement. It facilitates intellectual exchange with the University and the public by the encouragement of interdisciplinary activity, which extends to the sciences and other orders of knowledge. It has the capacity to offer taught programs in support of faculty and graduate research, and in partnership with alumni.
The humanities encompass philosophical, historical, social, ethical, legal, aesthetic, religious, linguistic, and ideological investigations of our world. Humanistic research includes many kinds of scholarship, such as history, criticism, theory, interpretation, and translation. The arts may be understood as the expression of human experience in various modes, such as literature, theater, music, dance, film, painting, printmaking, sculpture, and design.
The Willson Center for Humanities and Arts was founded as the Humanities Center (1987) and named thereafter the Center for Humanities and Arts (1997) and the Jane and Harry Willson Center for Humanities and Arts (2005).
The Willson Center is a constituent of the Office of Research at the University of Georgia, and is a member of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes, the National Humanities Alliance, and the Alliance for the Arts in Research Universities (a2ru).