Willson Center for Humanities and Arts
The University of Georgia
The University of Georgia Arts Council will celebrate its tenth annual Spotlight on the Arts festival throughout the month of November with more than 60 events and exhibitions in the literary, performing, and visual arts.
The Consulates General of Canada in Atlanta and Miami, in partnership with the Coasts, Climates, the Humanities, and the Environment Consortium and the University of Georgia Institute of Native American Studies, presented an online event series in Fall 2021 on climate change and environmental justice, in the particular context of Indigenous coastal communities in Canada and the United States Southeast.
Conversation One
Environmental Justice: Coasts, Climate Change and Communities in Canada and the US
Thursday, October 28, 2021
Dr. Tina Loo (Moderator): University Killam Professor, Department of History, University of British Columbia, Musqueam territory
Natalia Brown: Climate Justice Program Manager, Catalyst Miami
Dr. Kelsey Leonard: Water scientist, legal scholar, policy expert, writer, and enrolled citizen of the Shinnecock Nation; Assistant Professor, Faculty of Environment, University of Waterloo
Jeff Currie: Member, Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina; Lumber Riverkeeper, Winyah Rivers Alliance
Conversation Two
Climate Change and Indigenous Arts
Monday, November 15, 2021
Dr. LeAnne Howe (Moderator): Eidson Distinguished Professor in American Literature, Department of English, and Director, Institute of Native American Studies, University of Georgia
Beth Roach: U.S. Accelerator Program Lead, Women’s Earth Alliance; Co-founder, Alliance of Native Seedkeepers
Carla Hemlock: Kanienkehaka – Mohawk, Textile and Mixed Media Artist
Jennifer Foerster: Poet of German, Dutch, and Mvskoke descent; member, Mvskoke (Creek) Nation of Oklahoma
Janet Rogers: Poet, Media Producer and owner and editor of Ojistoh Publishing
Marianne Nicolson: Artist activist of the Musgamakw Dzawada’enuxw First Nations, part of the Kwakwaka’wakw (Kwak’wala speaking peoples) of the Pacific Northwest Coast; Trained in both traditional Kwakwaka’wakw forms and culture and contemporary gallery and museum-based practice.
In partnership with the Graduate School, the Willson Center invites proposals for a new round of Shelter Projects, a micro-fellowship program to support graduate students in the creation of shareable reflections on their experience of the pandemic through the arts and humanities.
The Willson Center will welcome Pulitzer Prize winner and former Poet Laureate of the United States Natasha Trethewey to the University of Georgia as the 2021-2022 Delta Visiting Chair for Global Understanding. Trethewey will visit UGA and Athens April 21-22.
The Willson Center invites nominations from faculty and students for the 2022-23 Delta Visiting Chair for Global Understanding.
The Coastal Futures Conservatory will host members of the Coasts, Climates, Humanities and the Environment Consortium (CCHEC) at the University of Virginia’s’s Coastal Research Center in Oyster, VA. The Conservatory is a UVA project to integrate arts and humanities into coastal change research, in partnership with the NSF-funded Virginia Coast Reserve Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) station. It is also a member of the global HfE Observatories network. The CCHEC was founded with a grant from the Mellon Foundation, is currently comprised of five universities of the Southeast, and proceeds from place-based community alliances that share humanities archives and practices as the means to understand the deep time, and possible futures, of coastal life in the south-east.
This field gathering will proceed from immersion in the Conservatory’s model to an open conversation about shared projects, possible next stages of collaboration, and joint grant opportunities. Upon conclusion of the in-person gathering in Oyster, the Conservatory will host an online concert and symposium, open to the public, featuring compositions selected from our international ecoacoustic competition for works on coastal change.
“The Willson Center’s 2020 – 2021 annual report showcases the dedication, resilience, and creativity of the University of Georgia’s humanities and arts communities. In a time of great challenge, they demonstrated the essential role that scholarship and creative practice play in fostering connection and understanding.”
Where Am I? is a series of brief video talks by humanities and arts faculty, students, and community members at the University of Georgia who share their research, creations, conversations and personal reflections.
Elizabeth Wright, Distinguished Research Professor of Spanish literature in the department of Romance languages and associate academic director of the Willson Center, is a principal investigator of a grant project that has been funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
The Franklin College and the Willson Center announce a call for proposals to sponsor humanities and arts graduate students to attend the National Humanities Center’s Podcasting the Humanities virtual institute scheduled for January 10-14, 2022.
Jack Yeats was born on August 29, 1871. To mark his 150th birthday friends of his work will gather in a celebration of his art and writing on Sunday, August 29, 2021, at 2 p.m. EDT (7 p.m. Irish time).
The University of Georgia faculty and graduate students in the humanities and arts have great success at winning awards and fellowships from national and international organizations, as well as institutional honors from UGA.
Two UGA graduate students have been awarded fellowships through the university’s recently established Arts Lab Cluster, a multi-year initiative to enhance research, practice and community engagement in the arts.
The Willson Center Graduate Student Shelter Scholarship provides support of $500 toward arts and humanities projects as part of a graduate degree program. Application is open to any humanities and arts graduate student registered for an advanced degree.
The Willson Center annually awards one-year research fellowships to a group of faculty members in the humanities and arts. Congratulations to the 2021-2022 Willson Center Faculty Research Fellows.
