Also beginning in 2009, the Center has used funds from the Humanities Endowment, Yulee Endowment, and Rothman Endowment to support faculty and graduate students in organizing one-day and longer-running events addressing critical topics in the humanities. These lectures, conferences, workshops, film screenings, and performances with talkbacks present new humanities scholarship, foster the exchange of interpretations, and make these accessible to an audience coming from a variety of disciplines as well as the wider public.
One program in 2020-21 was Disaster and the Body, a series of events organized by Profs. Colleen Rua and Rachel Carrico in the UF School of Theatre + Dance. This project was originally imagined as a residency and symposium examining how artists create theatre and dance pieces as sites of healing and social critique in response to hurricanes and other forms of (un)natural disasters, as a way to explore issues of climate change, displacement, environmental racism, and the precariousness of the Gulf Coast and Caribbean. Adapting to the (un)natural epidemic of COVID-19, this project took the form of virtual discussions with guest artists, scholars, and UF classes, culminating in a multilingual Zoom Webinar on April 19, 2021. Webinar panelists included: Choreographer Michelle Gibson (Dallas, Texas); members of the Y no había luz theatre collective, Yari Helfeld and Julio Morales (San Juan, Puerto Rico); Alana Jackson (UF Center for Arts in Medicine); and Dr. Antonio Sajid López (UF Spanish and Portuguese Studies). Attendees left the event with a new understanding of the integral role of the arts and humanities in organizing recovery efforts, a discussion that is immediate and urgent in the ongoing impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. The UF Center for Arts, Migration, and Entrepreneurship has funded an ongoing working group to continue discussions around artists’ response to disaster.