Asking “What can’t you do with an A.B. degree?” the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences is encouraging students to consider undergraduate degrees in the humanities, arts, and social sciences as the foundation of a versatile skill set with enormous value to employers as well as to the students themselves.

Graduate and undergraduate students in the humanities and arts are encouraged to participate in a STEM communications contest hosted by the University of Georgia Libraries.

Congratulations to Sheila McAlister, Emily McGinn, Susan Rosenbaum, and David Saltz, all awardees of grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

“Overt Revert,” an exhibition of paintings by Justin Barker, a first year MFA student in the Lamar Dodd School of Art’s painting and drawing area, is currently on display at the Willson Center house, 1260 S. Lumpkin St.

Nicholas Allen, Franklin Professor of English and Director of the Willson Center, is an Astor Visiting Fellow in the humanities at the University of Oxford this summer.

The a2ru Faculty Research Cluster is accepting proposals from full-time, research-budgeted faculty, whose projects have the potential to further UGA’s reputation as a leader in arts-based research. The deadline for proposals is May 1, 2017.

The Willson Center will partner with the department of Romance languages, the French Embassy in the United States, and other entities to host an Afro-French Studies Colloquium at 11:30 a.m. Thursday, April 20 in Room 137 of the Tate Center. The event is free and open to all.

The University of Georgia joined a2ru, the Alliance for the Arts in Research Universities, in 2016, and awarded its first round of arts research grants to UGA faculty earlier this semester.

The visit by 2017 Delta Chair for Global Understanding Colm Tóibín to Clarke Central High School was featured in the Washington Post on March 23. Athens public education advocate Bertis Downs, a member of the Willson Center Board of Friends, wrote a guest post on Valerie Strauss’s Answer Sheet blog highlighting Tóibín’s conversation with CCHS students, part of his three days of events as Delta Chair.

The Whiting Public Engagement Fellowship is designed for nominees whose proposed project and professional expertise are both squarely in the humanities. The proposed project should engage a specific public beyond the academy in the humanities and the nominee should play a significant leadership role in the project.

The Willson Center will welcome the internationally acclaimed Irish writer Colm Tóibín to the University of Georgia as the second annual Delta Visiting Chair for Global Understanding March 15-17, 2017.

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. Acheson and Almeta Tulloss, executive director of the Athens-based organization, have partnered with the Willson Center to produce a symposium on “Food, Culture, and Community” on Feb. 22, the first in what is planned to be a series of annual collaborations for the Willson Center’s Global Georgia Initiative.

The symposium’s main event is a 4 p.m. panel discussion in the UGA Chapel that will bring together a handful of world-renowned figures in culinary and food policy circles. Joining Tulloss on the panel will be Chef Tom Collicchio, author, restaurateur, and head judge on the Bravo TV series “Top Chef”; Helen Rosner, executive editor of the online food culture magazine Eater; Rashid Nuri, president and CEO of the Atlanta-based Truly Eating Well Center for Natural Urban Agriculture; and Chef Michel Nischan, author, food equity advocate, and founder and CEO of the nonprofit organization Wholesome Wave.

Acheson will serve as the panel’s moderator and Chuck Reece, editor in chief of the online magazine The Bitter Southerner, will give opening remarks before the discussion.

The symposium will also include a cooking competition for high school students at Athens Community Career Academy, with some of the visiting panelists as judges, at 11:30 a.m., and a 7 p.m. dinner to benefit Seed Life Skills hosted by Acheson’s Five & Ten restaurant in partnership with Creature Comforts Brewing and the Willson Center. Tickets to the dinner have sold out and attendance at the cooking contest is limited. To inquire about attending the contest, email the Willson Center at wcha@uga.edu.

A related event will be held Feb. 23 in partnership with the department of history and Dirty History, an interdisciplinary workshop in agriculture, environment, and capitalism. Marcia Chatelain, associate professor of history at Georgetown University, will speak on “Burgers in the Age of Black Capitalism: How Civil Rights and Fast Food Changed America After 1968” at 5 p.m. in Room 101 of LeConte Hall.

“Seed Life Skills works to provide teachers and students with resources to enhance science learning, practice functional finance skills, and we provide hands-on support to classrooms through community collaborations – all as a means to advocate for the profession of Family and Consumer Sciences,” Tulloss said. “We believe every student in America should have the opportunity to learn these essential skills in a fun, practical, and impactful way.”

Acheson has participated in the Willson Center’s Global Georgia Initiative once before, hosting a conversation with Southern Foodways Alliance Director John T. Edge in 2015. “The Willson Center has been such an amazing champion for so many great things in Athens, so to have Seed Life Skills invited to partner with them for this symposium is really exciting for us,” Acheson said.

Regarding the panel discussion, he added, “Gathering a group like this, a motley crew of wonderfully talented and brilliant minds of food policy… I am interested in whittling down to what concise action can be taken to improve the food sphere for everyone in this country.”

The symposium is presented in partnership with Five & Ten, Creature Comforts Brewing, 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.

The Willson Center’s Global Georgia Initiative presents global problems in local context with a focus on how the arts and humanities can intervene. The series is made possible by the support of private individuals and the Willson Center Board of Friends.

Nicholas Allen, Franklin Professor of English and Willson Center director, has secured a grant from the National Endowment of the Humanities to support “Remus, Celie, and Me: Preserving and Presenting the History and Life behind the Literature of Putnam County.”

The Willson Center has announced its schedule of events for the 2017 Global Georgia Initiative, an annual speaker and events series that presents global problems in local context with a focus on how the arts and humanities can intervene.

Sujata Iyengar, professor of English at UGA, and Professor Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin of the Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3 (UPVM) have earned a grant from the French American Cultural Exchange (FACE) Foundation through the Partner University Fund (administered through the French Embassy) to subsidize a series of conference-festivals, symposia, and workshops, “Scene-Stealing/Ravir la scène.”

The three-year cost-sharing grant will encourage knowledge-exchange and collaboration among faculty and PhD students at UGA and UPVM. Supported events will include the conference-festival “Balcony Scenes/Scènes de Balcon” at UPVM in November 2016; the symposium “Bedchamber Scenes/Scènes de lit” at UGA in April 2017; and workshops and a conference-festival on “Scenes in the Other’s Language/Scènes dans la langue de l’autre” at both UPVM and UGA in April 2017, November 2018, and April 2019. Selected proceedings will be eligible for peer-review and publication in the open-access, online, multimedia journal Scene Focus/Arrêt sur Scène.

“Scene-stealing/Ravir la Scène” builds on existing strengths at both institutions: the study of English and French Renaissance and Enlightenment Drama through UPVM’s project “Scene Focus/Arrêt sur Scène” (funded by France’s IRCL), and of Shakespearean adaptation, particularly through the UGA-faculty-founded and run online scholarly periodical Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation. The grant also funds faculty at both partner institutions to collaborate and develop a set of online open-access graduate modules, with the goal of broadening and internationalizing graduate curricula.

The fund’s external peer-reviewers, from France and the United States, commented that the project leaders, “accomplished and productive scholars and senior members of their faculty[,]… have worked extensively and successfully in the area of the proposed project,” and they further praised the project’s “academic goals (contribution to our knowledge and understanding of theatrical history and theatrical practice), the cross-cultural opportunities it will provide to its participants and… its efforts to engage members of each local community in its work.” They added, “[T]he cross cultural dimension of the project might very well provide a model for scholars in such other academic disciplines as history and art to explore how culture affects interpretation.”