In the 2022-23 academic year, the Center’s grants supported the enhancement of library collections in four areas critical to contemporary humanities research in general, and at UF in particular: Asian Studies, environmental humanities, children’s literature, and artificial intelligence.
James Gerien-Chen (History) received an award, “Strengthening Library Holdings in Asian Studies,” to acquire innovative secondary scholarship in Asian Studies cutting across temporal, disciplinary, and regional/national divides.
Hina Shaikh (Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies) received a grant toward “Developing a Diverse, Inclusive, and Ethical Artificial Intelligence Library Collection in the Humanities.”
Terry Harpold (English) was funded to build library collections on climate change through acquisitions in “Environmental Humanities and Climate Catastrophe: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Crisis in the 21st Century.”
Jinxui ‘Serena’ Liu’s (Education) award, “Bilingual Children’s Books: Bridging Cultural Gaps with Literature” facilitated procuring books in an area that still comprises only around 1% of the children’s literature holdings in the Education Library.
SPOTLIGHT | Developing a Diverse, Inclusive, and Ethical Artificial Intelligence Library Collection in the Humanities
Recent AI faculty hires and the creation of new curricula outside of the traditional STEM fields of study translate to a critical need for AI-related library materials in the areas of humanities to support this initiative. In the process of developing a diverse and inclusive collection, it is vital to recognize the existing gender gap and implicit biases in the field of AI and counter this by including sources specifically addressing ethics and fairness, women, the LGBTQ+ community, and other underrepresented groups, as well as privacy concerns.
Speaker Series and Workshops in the Humanities
The Center continued to support speaker series and workshops in the humanities throughout a year when public programs gradually became a part of our cultural lives again after the past few years of pandemic restrictions. Including conferences, workshops, and exhibitions, funded projects ranged from analysis of cultural ideals of beauty and methods to recover Classical sculptural techniques to considerations of the latest research on bilingualism and social diversity.
SPOTLIGHT | Deborah Willis: Posing Beauty in African American Culture
This event was part of “Posing Beauty in African American Culture,” an exhibition exploring artistic and popular cultural representations of Blackness and beauty in a historical frame. On March 30, 2023, the Harn Museum of Art hosted a conversation between MacArthur Fellow, artist, curator, professor and eminent scholar in the history of Black photography Deborah Willis (New York University), and Jade Powers, the Harn Museum’s new curator of contemporary art. Drawing on themes presented in “Posing Beauty in African American Culture,” Willis and Powers’ wide-ranging discussion traversed ideas of beauty, joy, and self-fashioned Black identity in photography, video, fashion, and advertising dating from the 1890s to the present.
Read more articles from the CHPS 2022-23 Annual Newsletter >