Willson Center announces 2025 Global Georgia public event series
The Willson Center’s 2025 Global Georgia series of public events begins in January and continues throughout the spring. More events will be added as they are finalized.
The Global Georgia public event series brings world class thinkers to Georgia. It presents global problems in local context by addressing pressing contemporary questions, including the economy, society, and the environment, with a focus on how the arts and humanities can intervene. Global Georgia combines the best in contemporary thinking and practice in the arts and humanities with related advances in the sciences and other areas. The series is made possible by the support of private individuals and the Willson Center Board of Friends, as well as by a grant from the Mellon Foundation.
Global Georgia 2025
Jan 23 • 5:30 pm • Ciné
Todd Braje: “Understanding Imperiled Earth: How Our Past Can Guide Our Future”
This lecture is presented by the department of anthropology, the Georgia Museum of Natural History, and the Willson Center. It is free and open to all, with no registration required.
Todd Braje is the executive director of the Museum of Natural and Cultural History at the University of Oregon specializing in long-term human-environmental interactions, the archaeology of maritime societies, historical ecological approaches to understanding coastal hunter-gatherer-fishers, and the peopling of the Americas. His 2024 book, Understanding Imperiled Earth: How Archaeology and Human History Can Inform Our Planet’s Future, is about the critical importance of archaeology and deep history for creating a more sustainable world and combating the modern environmental crisis.
From atmospheric warming to biodiversity loss, deforestation, overfishing, and pollution, we live on a planet in peril. Together, we face an uncertain future in the age of humans. But, as daunting as the challenges may seem, they are solvable, and solutions can be found by looking to our past. Now more than ever, the past matters for future Earth, and archaeology and history must act as critical guides. Drawing from examples in his new book, Understanding Imperiled Earth, Braje makes connections between history and today’s hot-button environmental news stories to reveal how the study of our ancient past can help us build a more sustainable and resilient future.
Feb 19 • 6 pm • 40 Watt Club
Claire L. Evans: “How To Chain Trip: Making Human Music with AI”
Claire L. Evans is a writer and musician exploring biology, technology, and culture. She will give a talk titled “How To Chain Trip: Making Human Music with AI” followed by performances by Athens musicians. The event, which is free and open to the public, is part of UGA’s Spring Signature Lecture Series.
Evans is the singer of the Grammy-nominated pop group YACHT, co-founder of VICE’s imprint for speculative fiction, Terraform, and co-editor, with Brian Merchant, of the accompanying anthology Terraform: Watch Worlds Burn (MCD Books, 2022). Her 2018 history of women in computing, Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet, published by Penguin Random House, has been translated into six languages and was named one of the Top 10 Best Nonfiction Tech Books of All Time in 2023.
Her writing has appeared in MIT Technology Review, The Verge, Rhizome.org, The Guardian, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Aeon, among others. Her 2022 profile of the lost hacker Susy Thunder was nominated for an ASME Award; a feature film adaptation of the story is currently in development at Paramount Pictures.
She has given invited talks at the Hirshhorn Museum, Walker Art Center, TEDx, La Gaité Lyrique, Google I/O, The New Museum, XOXO Festival, MUTEK, Goethe Institut, Manchester International Festival, SXSW, Gray Area, Neural Information Processing Systems, the Association for Computational Linguistics, and the Decentralized Web Summit, among others. She is a 2024 MacDowell Fellow.
She lives in Los Angeles, where she is an advisor to students in the Media Design Practices program at Art Center College of Design.
If you are in need of any accommodations in order to attend this event, please contact Dave Marr, Willson Center director of communications, at davemarr@uga.edu at least seven days before the event.
Mar 14 • 5:30 pm • Georgia Museum of Art
The Willson Center, the Georgia Museum of Art, the UGA Humanities Council, and the department of history will present a screening of We Were Here – The Untold History of Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, a groundbreaking documentary directed by Fred Kuwornu, as part of the 2025 UGA Humanities Festival. A moderated conversation will follow the screening, which is free and open to the public.
We Were Here, filmed across Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, England, The Netherlands, and Brazil and showcased at the 60th International Venice Biennale of Art in 2024, explores the presence of Africans in Europe during the 15th and 16th centuries through the reinterpretation of famous paintings depicting Africans. It is a unique work in terms of both aesthetics and content, attracting many visitors and receiving wide international acclaim. This multilingual film helps students understand Europe’s historical and current context regarding its Black population, exploring the evolution of racial concepts since the 16th century and revealing the untold stories and roles of influential African-Europeans during the Renaissance, including ambassadors, princes, saints, writers, and painters like Juan de Pareja. This film offers an invaluable resource for academic discussions, inviting deeper exploration of African contributions to European history and art.
Mar 26 • 4 pm • UGA Chapel
Betty Jean Craige Lecture: Charles Johnson
This event is presented as the Department of Comparative Literature and Intercultural Studies’s annual Betty Jean Craige Lecture, co-sponsored by the Willson Center and by the UGA Humanities Council as part of the university’s 2025 Humanities Festival. It is free and open to all, with no registration required. The Betty Jean Craige Lecture honors Craige, University Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature and a former director of the Willson Center.
Charles Johnson is the author of 16 books, among them the novels Middle Passage, Oxherding Tale, Faith and the Good Thing, and Dreamer; the story collections: The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (nominated for a PEN/Faulkner award), Soulcatcher and Other Stories, and Dr. King’s Refrigerator and Other Bedtime Stories; and works of philosophy and criticism such as Being and Race: Black Writing Since 1970 and Turning the Wheel: Essays on Buddhism and Writing.
He is also a screenwriter, essayist, professional cartoonist, international lecturer, and for 20 years served as fiction editor of Seattle Review. He received the 1990 National Book Award (fiction) for Middle Passage, NEA and Guggenheim fellowships, a Writers Guild Award for his PBS drama “Booker,” two Washington State Governor’s Awards for literature, the Academy Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and numerous other prizes and honorary degrees. In 1998 he received a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship (“genius” grant), and in 2003 literary scholars founded the Charles Johnson Society at the American Literature Association.
Johnson is Pollock Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Washington.
Mar 27 • 5:30 pm • Peabody Hall 115
Ferdia Lennon: Reading and Conversation
This event is presented by the Willson Center and by the UGA Humanities Council as part of the university’s 2025 Humanities Festival. It is also part of UGA’s Spring Signature Lecture Series. It is free and open to all, with no registration required.
Ferdia Lennon was born and raised in Dublin. He holds a BA in History and Classics from University College Dublin and an MA in Prose Fiction from the University of East Anglia. Glorious Exploits is his first novel. A Sunday Times bestseller, it was adapted for BBC Radio 4 and was the winner of the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize and the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize for comic fiction for 2024. After spending many years in Paris, he now lives in Norwich with his wife and son.
Glorious Exploits was published in the U.S. by MacMillan in 2024, and will be released in paperback in March, 2025. Along with winning the Waterstones and Bollinger prizes, it was shortlisted for the Nero Book Award for Debut Fiction (formerly the Costa Book Awards) and for the Newcomer of the Year by the Irish Book Awards, and was longlisted for the Carnegie Medal of Excellence.
From the publisher:
On the island of Sicily amid the Peloponnesian War, the Syracusans have figured out what to do with the surviving Athenians who had the gall to invade their city: they’ve herded the sorry prisoners of war into a rock quarry and left them to rot. Looking for a way to pass the time, Lampo and Gelon, two unemployed potters with a soft spot for poetry and drink, head down into the quarry to feed the Athenians if, and only if, they can manage a few choice lines from their great playwright Euripides. Before long, the two mates hatch a plan to direct a full-blown production of Medea. After all, you can hate the people but love their art. But as opening night approaches, what started as a lark quickly sets in motion a series of extraordinary events, and our wayward heroes begin to realize that staging a play can be as dangerous as fighting a war, with all sorts of risks to life, limb, and friendship.
Told in a contemporary Irish voice and as riotously funny as it is deeply moving, Glorious Exploits is an unforgettable ode to the power of art in a time of war, brotherhood in a time of enmity, and human will throughout the ages.
If you are in need of any accommodations in order to attend this event, please contact Dave Marr, Willson Center director of communications, at davemarr@uga.edu at least seven days before the event.
Mar 27-28 • Multiple times and locations
This symposium is sponsored by the Willson Center through a Public Impact Grant and co-hosted by the Georgia Museum of Art and the Lamar Dodd School of Art. It is organized in conjunction with three exhibitions at the University of Georgia:
- “The Awe of Ordinary Labors: 20th-Century Paintings from Ukraine,” Georgia Museum of Art (January 18 – June 1, 2025)
- “Ukraine’s People Revealed,” Foundation Gallery, Lamar Dodd School of Art (February – April 2025)
- “Demons, Prophets, and Détente,” contemporary art installation of ceramic sculpture by Richard N. Johnson, Foundation Gallery, Lamar Dodd School of Art (February – April 2025)
Highlights of the symposium include an opening reception, a panel discussion with the curators of “Ukraine’s People Revealed,” a keynote lecture by Ukranian art expert Myroslava Mudrak, and a lecture on “The Awe of Ordinary Labors” by symposium organizer Asen Kirin, professor of art history in the Lamar Dodd School of Art and Parker Curator of Russian Art at the Georgia Museum of Art. All events are free and open to the public unless otherwise indicated. For a complete symposium schedule, see the Georgia Museum of Art’s listing.
Apr 16 • 5:30 pm • Ciné
Seán Hewitt: Reading and Conversation
Seán Hewitt, winner of the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature for his 2022 memoir All Down Darkness Wide, will give a public reading from his new book followed by a moderated conversation. The event is presented by the Willson Center in partnership with the department of English and the Creative Writing Program.
Hewitt will read from his forthcoming novel Open, Heaven, which will be published in the U.S. on April 15 by Penguin Random House.
Hewitt was born in 1990. His earlier works include J. M. Synge: Nature, Politics, Modernism and the poetry collection Tongues of Fire, which was awarded the Laurel Prize and was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize, and a Dalkey Literary Award. He is the recipient of a Northern Writers’ Award, the Resurgence Prize and an Eric Gregory Award. Hewitt is a book critic for the Irish Times and teaches modern British and Irish literature at Trinity College Dublin, and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.