Congratulations

to 2015-2016 Willson Center Faculty Fellow Magdalena Zurawski, who has won the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award for Companion Animal, her 2015 collection from Litmus Press. Zurawski (pictured with the poet Sonia Sanchez at the PSA Awards ceremony in New York City) is an assistant professor of English and creative writing and the author of the 2008 novel The Bruise, which won both a 2008 Lambda Award and the 2007 Ronald Sukenick-American Book Review Innovative Fiction Prize.

Ed Pavlić, professor of English and creative writing and a recent Willson Center Faculty Fellow, published two books in 2015: Let’s Let That Are Not Yet : Inferno (National Poetry Series, Fence Books), a blend of poetry, lyrical prose, and memoir, and Who Can Afford to Improvise?: James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric and the Listeners (Fordham University Press), “a meditation on the life, writings, and legacy of James Baldwin and their relationship to the lyric tradition in black music.” Let’s Let that Are Not Yet has been shortlisted for the 2016 Firecracker Awards for Independent Literary Publishing in Poetry, and the noted music author and critic Dave Marsh listed Who Can Afford to Improvise? first in his recent summation of the best music books of the last year. Pavlić has three more books completed or in progress: a novel, a collection of poems, and his eagerly awaited No Time to Rest: James Baldwin’s Life in Letters to His Brother David.

The Willson Center has awarded its 2016-2017 Research Fellowships to twelve members of the UGA faculty in the humanities and arts. These fellowships are awarded in partnership with the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences. Willson Center Research Fellowships support excellence in arts and humanities research by providing course release from two normally assigned courses in one academic year.

The Willson Center Faculty Research Fellows for 2016-2017 are:

Yuri Balashov, Philosophy; LeAnne Howe, English; Kevin Jones, History; Amma Ghartey-Tagoe Kootin, Theatre and Film Studies and African American Studies; Peter Lane, Music; John Lowe, English; Barbara McCaskill, English; Cecília Rodrigues, Romance Languages; Amy Ross, Geography; Christopher Sieving, Theatre and Film Studies; Steven Soper, History; and Betsy Wright, Romance Languages.

We also acknowledge the recipients of the 2016-2017 OVPR Faculty Research Grants. Administered by the Willson Center, these awards support and encourage the development of strong programs of research and creative scholarship by both junior and senior faculty in the humanities and arts. The Faculty Research Grant is funded by the Office of the Vice President for Research through the University of Georgia Research Foundation.

The Faculty Research Grant awardees for 2016-2017 are:

Chris Cuomo, Philosophy; Angela Jones-Reus, Music; Derrick Lemons, Religion; Ari Levine, History; Alisa Luxenberg, Art; Susan Rosenbaum, English; Emily Sahakian, Theatre and Film Studies and Romance Languages; Marni Shindelman, Art; Stephanie Tingler, Music; and Martijn van Wagtendonk, Art.

Congratulations to all of these outstanding UGA faculty members for their well deserved honors and awards.

Two of the Willson Center’s most prominent events of the 2015-2016 academic year have recently been added to our Video page. “A Conversation with Alice Walker,” part of the acclaimed author and humanitarian’s visit to Athens and UGA as the inaugural Delta Chair for Global understanding, and David Haskell’s Odum Environmental Ethics Lecture on “The Forest Unseen: Ecology, Ethics, and Contemplation” are both presented in their entirety.

The Delta Visiting Chair, established by the Willson Center through the support of the Delta Air Lines Foundation, hosts outstanding global scholars, leading creative thinkers, artists and intellectuals who teach and perform research at UGA.

Alice Walker is the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in fiction, for her 1982 novel The Color Purple, which also earned a National Book Award. She has written six other novels, four collections of short stories, four children’s books, and volumes of essays and poetry.

Walker joined Valerie Boyd, associate professor in the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication, for a public conversation in the historic Morton Theatre in downtown Athens. Boyd is the editor of a forthcoming volume of Walker’s journals.

David Haskell is an author and professor of biology at The University of the South. Among many other awards, Haskell’s book The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature won the 2013 Best Book Award from the National Academies and was a finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction.

His visit to UGA was co-sponsored by the Willson Center, the Environmental Ethics Certificate Program, and the Integrative Conservation Ph.D. Program. Haskell’s lecture was the keynote for the Third Annual Symposium on Integrative Conservation.

The Odum Environmental Ethics Lecture is named for Eugene Odum (1913-2002), a UGA instructor from 1940 until his retirement in 1984. He has been called the “father of modern ecology” and was the author of the pioneering book Fundamentals of Ecology. Odum was instrumental in the creation of the Institute of Ecology at UGA, the Savannah River Ecology Laboratory, and the Sapelo Island Marine Science Institute.

Two projects of eHistory, an initiative founded by Stephen Berry and Claudio Saunt of the UGA department of history and affiliated with the Willson Center Digital Humanities Lab, have launched websites in recent weeks and been written up in the national media.

CSI Dixie is headed by Berry, Gregory Professor of the Civil War Era in the department of history and Willson Center associate academic director for digital humanities. The web-based project uses 19th-century coroners’ records from South Carolina to create a detailed picture of how ordinary people died in the Victorian-era South, providing rare glimpses into suicide, homicide, infanticide, abortion, child abuse, spousal abuse, master-slave murder, and slave on slave violence.

The US News Map is a collaborative project by Berry and Saunt, Russell Professor of American History and chair of the department of history, with the Georgia Tech Research Institute. The interactive map allows users to see how awareness of key historical events and ideas spread across the country using data from nearly 2,000 U.S. newspapers – about 10 million pages – published between 1836 and 1924.

The GTRI’s informative article on the US News Map is here. The project has also been written about in the Washington Post, as well as in Slate and Mental Floss.

Slate has also published a piece on CSI Dixie, and the project was mentioned in The New York Times as well.

As part of the 2016 Global Georgia Initiative, the Willson Center presents Pictures of Us: Photographs from The Do Good Fund Collection, an exhibition in six venues on the University of Georgia campus and in the Athens community.

The Willson Center has announced its 2016 Global Georgia speaker series, which this year will also include an international symposium on the shared history of the U.S. South and Cuba and a multi-venue exhibition of photographs from The Do Good Fund collection.

Alan Rutenberg, Humanities Specialist in the Office of Research at the University of Tennessee, will offer two workshops on humanities fellowships at the Georgia Center for Continuing Education on March 16-17, 2016.

The Willson Center and the Athens Fashion Collective will present a weekend of sustainable fashion events January 28-30, featuring Natalie Chanin, founder and designer of Alabama Chanin, and Georgia Sewn, a one-day expo of the regional fashion design industry.

The Willson Center mourns the passing of our benefactor, Jane Willson.

The Willson Center has organized or sponsored a variety of events for UGA’s 2015 Spotlight on the Arts festival, including film screenings in Athens and Atlanta, a tour of historic Oconee Hill Cemetery, a tailgate celebration before UGA’s football game with Kentucky, and an international conference on William Shakespeare and appropriation.

The UGA Arts Council has introduced the “All Arts Card” for students.

For $99, the card gives students admission to more than 60 concerts and plays with a full ticket price value of more than $2,000. The All Arts Card includes admission to performances at the UGA Performing Arts Center, Hugh Hodgson School of Music, Department of Theatre and Film Studies and Department of Dance during the 2015-2016 academic year.

To order, go to http://pac.uga.edu/ and click on the student tab.

Many additional UGA Arts events are free to all students, including admission to the Georgia Museum of Art and galleries at Lamar Dodd School of Art, various events from The Georgia Review, UGA Press, Special Collections Libraries and more.

Go to arts.uga.edu to sign up for a monthly preview of events or follow UGA on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram for more information on events year-round.

Provost Pamela Whitten touts digital humanities at UGA, including programs associated with the Willson Center’s DigiLab.

The Willson Center is profiled as a national model for fostering successful humanities communities as part of a new initiative by the National Humanities Alliance Foundation, the supporting foundation of the National Humanities Alliance.