Administration
Nicholas Allen, Director
Baldwin Professor in Humanities
Nicholas Allen is the director of the Willson Center and Baldwin Professor in Humanities. His latest book, Ireland, Literature, and the Coast: Seatangled, was published in December 2020 by Oxford University Press. He has been the Burns Visiting Scholar at Boston College and has received many grants and awards, including from the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Irish Research Council.
Winnie Smith, Associate Director
Winnie Smith has worked at UGA since 2007, previously at the Mary Frances Early College of Education and the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences. She is a proud Double Dawg, receiving both her BFA in jewelry and metalsmithing and her MAED in art/museum education from UGA. Winnie manages internal funds from the Office of Research and external funds including a $1 million grant from the Mellon Foundation: Culture and Community at the Penn Center National Historic Landmark District, received in 2020. She works closely with the Willson Center Board of Friends on fundraising and events and has overseen the creation of two new endowments for the center. Winnie works with the Faculty Advisory Board on grants and awards and serves as the point of contact for faculty and students seeking support. She manages the Delta Visiting Chair for Global Understanding, which brought Pulitzer Prize winners Natasha Trethewey and Hua Hsu to campus and to Clarke County schools. Winnie serves as an ad hoc member of the Arts Council and Spotlight on the Arts committees, is a frequent presence at the Georgia Museum of Art and the High Museum, and strives to connect the Willson Center with local arts exhibits and communities.
Dave Marr, Communications Director
Dave Marr is a University of Georgia graduate in film studies and journalism. A writer and musician who has lived in Athens since 1991, he was city editor and film columnist at Flagpole magazine prior to joining the Willson Center in 2012. He oversees all of the Willson Center’s public communications as well as those of its grant-funded initiatives, and helps coordinate public programs in the arts and humanities throughout the university, including the Humanities Festival, the Global Georgia events series, the Delta Visiting Chair, the Ferdinand Phinizy Lecture, and Spotlight on the Arts.
Calli Hester, Program Coordinator
Calli Hester is a University of Georgia graduate, with a bachelor’s degree in political science from the School of Public and International Affairs. Calli is a local Athenian with a background in event planning and office administration. Before joining the Willson Center in 2022, she was an event coordinator at Epting Events. She supports the Willson Center director in all initiatives and provides a central link between the director, associate director, and communications director to manage finances, programs, and collaborations.
Angela Dore, Research Coordinator
Angela Dore is the Research Coordinator of “Culture and Community at the Penn Center National Historic Landmark District,” a partnership initiative of Penn Center and the Willson Center, funded by a grant from the Mellon Foundation. She received her BA from Spelman College and earned her MA in business design and arts leadership from Savannah College of Art and Design. Her interests include art history, cultural and land preservation, and designing multigenerational creative programming and outreach.
Barbara McCaskill, Associate Academic Director
Professor of English; Co-Director, Civil Rights Digital Library Initiative
Barbara McCaskill conducts research on 19th- and early 20th-century African American Literature, and is an expert on William and Ellen Craft, fugitives from slavery in Georgia and transatlantic abolitionists. Her six books include Love, Liberation, and Escaping Slavery: William and Ellen Craft in Literature and Culture (UGA, 2015) and with Caroline Gebhard, African American Literature in Transition, 1880-1900 (Cambridge, 2025). She has held external fellowships at Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and the Du Bois Institute, both at Harvard; the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; and various NEH Institutes and Seminars. In 2012 she was named the Fulbright Visiting Research Chair in Society and Culture at Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. McCaskill has co-directed externally funded public humanities initiatives such as the Womanist Studies Fellowships, the Civil Rights Digital Library, Culture and Community at the Penn Center National Historic Landmark, and The Genius of Phillis Wheatley Peters: A Poet and Her Legacies. She is recipient of the Lorraine A. Williams Leadership Award from the National Association of Black Women Historians (2019).
Elizabeth Wright, Associate Academic Director
Distinguished Research Professor of Spanish Literature, Department of Romance Languages; Editor, Bulletin of the Comediantes
Elizabeth Wright studies and teaches about early modern Spain in the context of imperial expansion. She is also editor of the Bulletin of the Comediantes, the international journal devoted to the study of early-modern Spanish theater. Her most recent book, The Epic of Juan Latino: Dilemmas of Race and Religion in Renaissance Spain (University of Toronto Press, 2016), traces how this one-time slave secured higher education, freedom, and social prominence. Now she is centering her focus on the Portuguese-Spanish cultural nexus for Iberia’s Atlantic Households: Slavery and Diaspora in the Age of Empire (1444-1640). Wright’s research has been supported with grants from the John Carter Brown Library, the Newberry Library, the American Philosophical Society, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the Renaissance Society of America, the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, the Fulbright, and the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition.
Tracey Johnson, Associate Academic Director
Assistant Professor of History and African American Studies
Tracey Johnson is an assistant professor in the department of history and the Institute for African American Studies. She specializes in social movements, the history of education, urban and political history, and the history of Black art and artists. She received her doctorate in African American and African Diasporic History from Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Professor Johnson has taught classes on Modern African American History, African American Women’s History, African American Art History and Museum Studies, and Art and Activism in the United States.
Stephen Berry, Associate Academic Director for Digital Humanities
Gregory Professor of the Civil War Era, Department of History
Stephen Berry is co-founder, with Claudio Saunt, of eHistory.org, a hub for digital history and innovation on campus. eHistory projects focus on a diverse range of topics, from datafying 19th-century coroner’s inquests; to collecting the letters of Civil War soldiers who wrote “by ear”; to mapping historical epidemics and population flows. Projects have been funded by Mellon, ACLS, NEH, and more. In addition to helping to build teams and sponsor digital humanities innovation at the Willson Center, Berry is the author or editor of eight books, including the forthcoming, The Original Black Panther: Prince Rivers and the Lost City of Hamburg with the University of Georgia Press.
Mark Callahan, Associate Academic Director for Arts Research and Practice
Artistic Director, UGA Arts Collaborative
Mark Callahan is the Artistic Director of the UGA Arts Collaborative, an interdisciplinary initiative for advanced research in the arts at the University of Georgia, and serves on the faculty of the School of Art. He is a graduate of Cranbrook Academy of Art and Rhode Island School of Design, where he was a member of the European Honors Program in Rome, Italy. Callahan’s work has been included in exhibitions at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA); Club Internet, MAMA: Showroom for Media and Moving Art in the Netherlands; the Telfair Museum in Savannah, Georgia; and used in concert by R.E.M. as a large-scale video projection. He was a co-principal investigator of “Enhancing Imaginative and Collaborative STEM Capacity through Creative Inquiry,” an Innovations in Graduate Education project supported by the National Science Foundation. Callahan’s essay “The Broadest Possible Interpretation of Creativity” is included in Critique Is Creative by Liz Lerman and John Borstel (Wesleyan Press).
Katie Ireland, Digital Humanities Fellow
Interim Head | Interim Lab Coordinator, Data Studio (formerly DigiLab), RCDM, University of Georgia Libraries
J. Derrick Lemons, Religion Fellow
Professor and Head, Department of Religion; Director, Center for Theologically Engaged Anthropology
J. Derrick Lemons is Professor and Department Head of religion, the Religion Fellow for the Willson Center, and the director of the Center for Theologically Engaged Anthropology. He represents the University of Georgia on the University System of Georgia’s faculty council, is Chair-elect of UGA’s University Council Executive Committee, and is Chair of the Committee on Intercollegiate Athletics. A recipient of two major John Templeton Foundation grants, Lemons was awarded the Albert Christ-Janer Creative Research Award and the University of Georgia Student Government Association Outstanding Professor Award. Lemons was the regionally elected coordinator (2019-2023) and president (2019-2020) for the American Academy of Religion’s Southeast Region.
Éric Marty, Digital Arts Fellow
Research Professional, Project AERO, Odum School of Ecology
Éric Marty is a composer and media artist who works in sound, interactive design and hybrid forms. He also conducts research in data visualization with ECOGIG (Ecosystem Impacts of Oil and Gas Inputs to the Gulf) in UGA’s Department of Marine Sciences. His artistic honors include the Canada Council for the Arts’ Stauffer Prize, the ALEA III International Composition Prize, composition prizes from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, ASCAP and SOCAN, and fellowships at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart and the Fondation Camargo near Marseilles. His installations and site-specific performances, supported by the Canada Council, have been exhibited at the ISCM World Music Days, the Ojai Music Festival, the International Digital Media and Arts Association, the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Flux Night Atlanta and the Akademie Schloss Solitude. Marty studied at the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies at the University of California at Berkeley, and holds a PhD in Composition and Computer Music. As Willson Center Digital Arts Fellow, Marty helps build interdisciplinary collaborations among the arts and sciences at UGA.
Scott Nesbit, Digital Humanities Fellow
Associate Professor of Digital Humanities and Coordinator of the Historic Preservation Program, College of Environment and Design
Scott Nesbit’s work explores the intersection between digital tools and humanistic questions, particularly questions touching on the history and spaces of the American South. He earned a PhD in history at the University of Virginia in 2013, where he wrote about the geography of slavery and emancipation in the Civil War South. From 2009 until 2014 he was the associate director of the Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond. He has led digital history projects such as Visualizing Emancipation, which used a wide array of textual sources – ranging from military correspondence to runaway slave advertisements found in southern newspapers – to map out where and when slavery fell apart during the American Civil War.
