Each academic year at the University of Georgia, the Willson Center sponsors numerous events, projects, and initiatives whose impacts reverberate well beyond campus. The 2012 fall semester has been particularly auspicious in that regard.

William Kretzschmar, Harry and Jane Willson Professor in the Humanities, will be awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Oulu in Finland. The honor will be conferred in May 2013.

The UGA professor of English has two volumes moving toward publication, and the selection of each distinguishes him highly among a different set of peers.

The upcoming inaugural Spotlight on the Arts Festival at UGA (November 3 – 11) is a great example of what we can achieve collectively to foreground the arts.

Stephen Berry is the Amanda and Greg Gregory Professor of the Civil War Era in the UGA Department of History and the Willson Center’s associate academic director for external grants. In that role, he is currently spearheading an initiative to make the Willson truly the central resource for grants in humanities and arts at the University of Georgia. As part of that initiative, the Willson Center will hold the first in a series of external grants roundtables and town-hall style discussions on November 5 from 4 – 5:30 pm in Room 148 of the Miller Learning Center.

This will be the Athens premiere of the film, which was purchased by the BET cable television network after its debut at the Sundance Film Festival but never received theatrical distribution. The screening is the Willson Center’s keynote event in the University of Georgia’s 2012 Spotlight on the Arts festival.

On Monday, Nov. 5 at 4 p.m. in room 148 of the Miller Learning Center, the Willson Center presents its inaugural Humanities and Arts Grants Town Hall.

Poet and novelist Suzanne Matson, a 2012 National Endowment for the Arts Fiction Writing Fellow and Chair of English at Boston College, will read from her fiction at 7 p.m. Thursday, October 11 at Ciné.

The University of Georgia’s inaugural Spotlight on the Arts festival begins November 3, and the Willson Center will be well represented. The variety of Willson-sponsored festival events will be highlighted by the local premiere of the 2006 feature film “Somebodies”, shot entirely in Athens but never distributed theatrically.

The Willson Center will hold a Cinema Roundtable entitled “Animation, Art, and Careers for UGA Students” at 3:30 p.m. Friday, September 28 in Room 148 of the Miller Learning Center. The discussion will be moderated by Richard Neupert, Wheatley Professor of the Arts and a Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor of Theatre and Film Studies in UGA’s Franklin College of Arts and Sciences.

Tough will speak about his new book, How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character, which is being published this month by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

The Willson Center has a new online grants portal for internal grants. The new system is designed to make the application process, the review process and the management process much more efficient in addition to reducing paper flow.

The Willson Center has added two new senior administrators: Antje Ascheid, Associate Academic Director for Arts and Public Programs, and Stephen Berry, Associate Academic Director for External Grants.