Speaker Series: Rethinking the Public Sphere IV: Public Humanities
In 2022-23, the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere will continue and conclude its multi-year series “Rethinking the Public Sphere,” with its fourth and final installation presenting on Public Humanities. We began Fall 2022 with the postponed visit by Brent Leggs (Executive Director, African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund) who lectured on preserving African American culture heritage on the national level and engaged in a conversation about Gainesville on a local level, as well. Our second visit in fall semester featured Prof. Barry Lam (University of California, Riverside) who presented on philosophy in the public sphere and offered a workshop on podcasting. In spring semester 2023, Nicholas Allen (Director, Willson Center, University of Georgia) will present on “Public Humanities as Environmental Humanities.”
We welcome new staff members to the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere:
Dr. Anirban Gupta-Nigam, Associate Director
Anirban Gupta-Nigam comes to UF from the University of California Humanities Research Insitute at the University of California, Irvine, (UCHRI) where he conducted research, developed, and managed a $750,000 Andrew W Mellon-funded initiative on a vision of the liberal arts for the 21st century as a Postdoctoral Scholar. He was previously a Graduate Researcher at UCHRI. He has a 2018 Ph.D. in Visual Studies from the University of California, Irvine with a dissertation titled “Other Frontiers: Administrative Media and Intimate Domains of American Settler Futurity.” Prior to his Ph.D., Dr. Gupta-Nigam received a MPhil in Film Studies from the School of Arts & Aesthetics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi with a thesis entitled “Forensic Imaginaries: Media as Image and Apparatus in Contemporary India.”
Dr. Sara Agnelli, Assistant Director for Graduate Engagement
As Assistant Director for Graduate Engagement, Dr. Sara Agnelli aims at supporting graduate students in the humanities to broadly envision their own career paths in many exciting fields, both in academia and beyond. In collaboration with humanities faculty and graduate coordinators, Dr. Agnelli will develop a series of programs, workshops and events to expand graduate training in the humanities.
Dr. Agnelli is a classical philologist by training, an interdisciplinary researcher and mentor by profession, and a committed humanist at heart with degrees in Classics from the Catholic University in Milan (B.A. 2006, summa cum laude, and M.Phil. 2009), and University of Florida (Ph.D. 2016). After her doctorate, she taught for the Department of Classics and the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at UF, where she had the opportunity to expand her scholarship and to work on interdisciplinary research initiatives for the university and beyond. This collaborative focus led to an interest in bridging science and the humanities, from both comparative and international perspectives.