Willson Center for Humanities and Arts
The University of Georgia
A Department-Invited Artist or Lecturer program for virtual class presentations and Shelter Scholarships to support graduate students in the humanities and arts.
The online @UGAResearch news magazine has published an article featuring interviews with four recipients of the Willson Center’s Shelter Projects micro-fellowships.
The Coasts, Climates, Humanities and the Environment Consortium is funded by a pilot grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for two years. Its partners are the University of Georgia, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Florida, and Louisiana State University. The consortium has a series of site-specific and publicly engaged research projects in coastal sites, which look at questions of climate breakdown, community resilience and the capacity of the humanities to imagine the futures of places under threat from storms and sea-level rise.
This is the last in a series of four conversations featuring participants in the consortium and scholars whose research informs its work. All four conversations are available here.
The full conversation and a short preview are below.
The participants are:
Jacqueline Lawton, University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill
Stephen Berry, University of Georgia
Ken Sassaman, University of Florida
Nicholas Allen, moderator, University of Georgia
FULL CONVERSATION
PREVIEW
The Willson Center, in partnership with the Graduate School, the UGA Arts Council, the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, and Flagpole magazine, has awarded 34 $500 micro-fellowships in its Shelter Projects program.
Willson Center Director Nicholas Allen chaired a virtual conversation hosted by the Public Humanities Network of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes on May 11.
The University of Georgia faculty in the humanities and arts frequently have great success at winning awards and fellowships from national and international organizations. Here are a few highlights from the 2019-2020 academic year.
A more exhaustive list of recent external grants, fellowships, and awards is available here.
Joshua Barkan (Geography), Institute for Advance Study – Princeton, NJ, for 2020
Rachel Gabara (Romance Languages), NEH Fellowship for 2020
Diana Graizbord (Sociology), Institute for Advance Study – Princeton, NJ, for 2020
Jennifer Palmer (History), ACLS Fellowship for 2020
Cassia Roth (History), Gilder Lehrman Center Fellowship for May 2021
Timothy Yang (History), Association for Asian Studies Northeast Asia Council Japan Research Grant (summer 2019)
Mark Abbe (Lamar Dodd School of Art) was awarded the Gerda Henkel Stiftung – Funding Initiative Patrimonies, 2020, for The Aphrodite−Al-‘Uzzá Conservation Collaborative: Conserving and Presenting Newly Discovered Marble Sculpture at The Petra Museum, Jordan.
Imi Hwangbo (Lamar Dodd School of Art) was one of our five Women to Watch featured in “Paper Routes – Georgia Women to Watch 2020” exhibition opening January 24th at the Museum of Contemporary Art Georgia (MOCA GA). Women to Watch is an exhibition program, held every two to three years, developed specifically for the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA) national and international outreach committees. Each of these exhibitions features emerging and underrepresented women artists from the states and countries in which the museum has outreach committees. The exhibition focuses on the transformation of paper into complex works of art.
Derrick Lemons (Religion) was named a visiting professor at Christ Church, the University of Oxford.
Esra Santesso (English) was awarded an NEH Summer Stipend for 2020 for her project on Representations of Islam and Muslims in Contemporary Graphic Narratives.
Elizabeth Wright (Romance Languages), editor, Bulletin of the Comediantes, 2019 Best Design Award from the Council for Editors of Learned Journals (CELJ)
The University of Georgia Research Awards, sponsored by the nonprofit University of Georgia Research Foundation, recognize outstanding research and scholarship by UGA faculty and graduate students whose bodies of work have gained broad recognition across many disciplines.
Joshua Bynum, Hugh Hodgson School of Music, Creative Research Medal
Peter Van Zandt Lane, Hugh Hodgson School of Music, Michael F. Adams Early Career Scholar Award
Richard Menke, Department of English, Albert Christ-Janer Creative Research Award
Elizabeth Wright, Department of Romance Languages, Distinguished Research Professor
Another in a series of video readings with personal messages from Nicholas Allen, Willson Center director and Professor in Humanities at UGA.
The Coasts, Climates, Humanities and the Environment Consortium is funded by a pilot grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for two years. Its partners are the University of Georgia, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Florida and Louisiana State University.
The Coasts, Climates, Humanities and the Environment Consortium is funded by a pilot grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for two years. Its partners are the University of Georgia, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Florida and Louisiana State University. The consortium has a series of site-specific and publicly engaged research projects in coastal sites, which look at questions of climate breakdown, community resilience and the capacity of the humanities to imagine the futures of places under threat from storms and sea-level rise.
This is the second in a series of conversations featuring participants in the consortium and scholars whose research informs its work. The first conversation is available here.
The full conversation and a short preview are below.
The participants are:
Malinda Maynor Lowery, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
Terry Harpold, University of Florida
Craig Colten, Louisiana State University
Nicholas Allen, moderator, University of Georgia
FULL CONVERSATION
PREVIEW
One of a series of video readings with personal messages from Nicholas Allen, Willson Center director and Professor in Humanities at UGA.
Today is celebrated around the world as the occasion of the fictional Leopold Bloom’s experience of the 16th of June 1904 in Dublin, as immortalized in James Joyce’s “Ulysses.”
The Coasts, Climates, Humanities and the Environment Consortium is funded by a pilot grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for two years. Its partners are the University of Georgia, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Florida and Louisiana State University. The consortium has a series of site-specific and publicly engaged research projects in coastal sites, which look at questions of climate breakdown, community resilience and the capacity of the humanities to imagine the futures of places under threat from storms and sea-level rise.
This is the first in a series of conversations featuring participants in the consortium and scholars whose research informs its work.
The full conversation and a short preview are provided here.
NOTE: There are some brief network interruptions during the beginning of the conversation, which end after about six minutes. We apologize for the distraction.
The participants are:
Steven Mentz, St. Johns University
Valerie Babb, Emory University
Alexandra Campbell, Edinburgh Napier University
Ryan Emmanuel, North Carolina State University
Nicholas Allen, moderator, University of Georgia
FULL CONVERSATION
PREVIEW
Shelter Projects is a micro-fellowship program to support graduate students and community-based artists and practitioners in the creation of shareable reflections on their experience of the current pandemic through the arts and humanities.
A note from our director regarding our public events and programs for the spring.
A poem selected by our director Nicholas Allen, Baldwin Professor in Humanities
Dear friends,
Epic poems tell the stories of heroes and their deeds. In doing so they tell us something both of the cultures that produced these figures, and of the art that casts them in poetic memory, which can be as far removed from fact as fiction. That distance is not a deficit but an opportunity to consider the things the artwork might not mean to say, or consider important. So in Beowulf, the hero kills Grendel, the monster’s mother, and a dragon, jealous of its hoard. This last is his undoing, for, to his companion Wiglaf’s regret,
Often when one man follows his own will
Many are hurt…
There is no epic, and no poetry, without our collective agreement to meet imaginatively at the work of art. In Beowulf, this requires a commitment to truth, honor and the giving of the self to others. In that society, reputation was not a fixed point but a constant readjustment, which even the most celebrated of heroes sometimes failed to make. Greatness was no end in itself, but a partner to the daily solidarities that kept a society together, from the mead hall to the shield wall. As the poem suggests, the darkest monster of all is drawn from the self-regarding specters of pride and greed, Beowulf unheeding of the advisors who bid him leave the dragon sleep, his mourning people haunted now by the vision of the Geat woman who cries “a wild litany of nightmare and lament.”
That we can read these words so many centuries later says something more optimistic about human society, which is its capacity for co-operation, that mutuality which is of the substance of that most radical practice, of reading. Beowulf comes to this ethical realization in its own way, true heroism a balance of grace and fairness, and expressed in a language the form and sound of which reminds us to keep our minds open to strangers as envoys of a greater understanding:
Swã begnornodon Gēata lēode
hlãfordes hryre, heorð-genēatas,
cwædon þæt hē wære wyruld-cyninga
manna mildust ond mon-ðwærust,
lēodum līðost ond lof-geornost.
Thank you for your good company over these past weeks. We will gather ourselves again in the mid-summer. Until then, read and be well.
Best,
Nicholas
