Beginning in 2018, the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere, with the support of the Robert and Margaret Rothman Endowment for the Humanities and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, has supported UF faculty participation in summer programs at the National Humanities Center (NHC) in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. These include: a one-month faculty residency at the NHC, and participation in virtual themed institutes that focus on practical teaching, research, and professionalization skills.
2021 Virtual Institute
Dr. Neil Weijer (George A. Smathers Libraries)
Podcasting the Humanities: Creating Digital Stories for the Public
The text of a book is only a part of the story that it tells. As curator of UF’s Rare Book Collection, Neil Weijer explores how people have transformed their own books to reflect changing needs and aspirations. Even if preserved, most of these stories are hidden from public view, but they can, and should, speak to us all. Neil Weijer intends to use podcasting to bring diverse voices to bear on the collections and empower more people to explore them. It is vital to keep the stories in these books alive and to create new meaning for the future.
2021 Summer Residency
Tace Hedrick (Professor, English and Center for Gender, Sexualities, and Women’s Studies)
Sexing the Cosmic Race: Gloria Anzaldúa, Ana Mendieta, Raphael Montañez Ortíz, and Walter Mercado, 1968-2019
This is a book about understanding the work of four United States artists: Chicanx lesbian writer Gloria Anzaldúa, Cuban American artist Ana Mendieta, Puerto Rican New Age performer Walter Mercado, and Nuyorican artist Rafael Montañez Ortíz. Their work has been grounded in two important movements. First, they were all deeply embedded in the Latinx and Chicanx counterculture movements of the 1960s and 70s, a period in the United States of heightened spiritual, cultural, and political activity. Second, they were profoundly influenced by Latin American spiritual beliefs and practices coming out of a long twentieth-century transnational investment in Latin American esoteric and New Age counterculture. In this way, United States ethnic racial and especially sexual concerns were intertwined with Latin American discourses, particularly Orientalized Indian and pre-Columbian indigenous spiritualities. These ideas and belief systems were and are used by these artists as ways of artistically reconceptualizing their own subjectivity as raced and sexualized minorities in the United States. My approach, from both sides of the transAmerican border, clarifies our understanding of their work through their appeals to a profoundly transnational American history that frequently used and connected together, across national borders, the lexicons of esoteric spirituality, race, and sexuality.