One year ago, I stepped into the role of Rothman Chair and Director with the desire to open new conversations that build awareness about the humanities, while supporting the center’s core constituents in research, teaching and learning, and the wider public. I am proud to report that this past year, the center took steps to extend its programming in multiple spaces, made two strategic hires, and continued to support high-quality humanities scholarship and community events throughout the year.
The center’s biggest new initiative was instituting the Alexander Grass Scholars Undergraduate Research Program. This innovative program provided a funded, project-based learning experience in humanities research for undergraduates from a range of disciplines and experience levels. A cohort of 20 students was selected through a competitive process to pursue group projects with the center’s partners. This year, projects were curated and led in collaboration with the A. Quinn Jones Museum & Cultural Center, the Matheson History Museum, the Harn Museum of Art, and George A. Smathers Libraries. After their group projects, students pursued individual projects under faculty and graduate student mentorship. A fall research symposium will showcase their individual projects to students and faculty across the university as well as the broader community. This program brings together our commitments to undergraduate education in the humanities and to our community partners, and we are thrilled to see how it develops.
The center’s next big programming initiative was to step into the world of the digital humanities: an area of scholarship at the intersection of digital technologies and humanistic methods and questions. With a generous $632,000 strategic funding grant from the UF President’s Office, the center will be building an interactive digital humanities lab to foster multidisciplinary collaborations, offer educational opportunities, and facilitate research. We aim for the lab to enrich humanities research, amplify its impact, and raise awareness of the critical value of humanistic inquiry.
In tandem with these new projects, the center continued to offer funding opportunities and events that support humanities researchers and students, and community engagement. We offered more than $180,000 in funding to faculty, graduate students, and public partners, which supported events reaching 1,700 audience members from around the globe, region, and campus. We are privileged to be a part of the professional development and many accomplishments of students and faculty across the humanities.
Moving forward, the center is building upon its existing programs while venturing into new initiatives. This evolution is reflected in our staffing changes over the past year. Unfortunately, we had to say goodbye to Associate Director Anirban Gupta-Nigam, as he moved on to a new phase of his professional life with UC Berkeley’s Institute for South Asia Studies. The center is grateful for the broad and creative perspective Anirban brought to humanities programming and research. Sara Agnelli, previously the center’s assistant director of graduate engagement, was promoted to associate director and has been flourishing in her new role. The center has also recently welcomed Kristina Forman in a newly created communications manager position. And in the fall, Silvia Stoyanova will join us as assistant director of digital humanities and undergraduate learning, to oversee our program building in the digital humanities.
I hope you will enjoy perusing this newsletter to learn more about the many funding programs and events that the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere supported this past year. We look forward to another year in which the center continues to support its core constituencies, engage new audiences, and communicate the value of the humanities to our quickly evolving social worlds.
Thank you to our donors, supporters and collaborators who make all that we do possible.
With gratitude,
Jaime Ahlberg
Rothman Chair and Director | Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere