"Humanities Institute" Archive

WFU Humanities Institute celebrates 10 years

The Humanities Institute is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year by gathering stories from faculty about their collaborations with the Institute over the past decade.

Photo of the founding faculty leadership of the Wake Forest Humanities Institute, from left, Mary Foskett, David Phillips, Sally Barbour and Dean Franco standing in Carswell Hall

Founding faculty leadership for the Wake Forest Humanities Institute, from left, Mary Foskett, David Phillips, Sally Barbour and Dean Franco.

Building on its liberal arts tradition, Wake Forest established the Humanities Institute to support innovative scholarship and collaboration in October 2010. The Humanities Institute publicly celebrated its launch in March 2011.

Mary Foskett, Wake Forest Kahle Professor of Religious Studies; Dean Franco, Winifred W. Palmer Professor in Literature, English; Sally Barbour, professor of Romance Languages; and David Phillips, associate professor of Interdisciplinary Humanities laid the groundwork and secured the funding that made the Institute possible. The National Endowment for the Humanities awarded Wake Forest a five-year, $500,000 challenge grant – the largest NEH grant Wake Forest had ever received. Original programming included faculty seminars, symposia, professional development, and support for collaborative faculty research and teaching.

In February 2013, Wake Forest alumnus Wade Murphy (’00) donated $1 million to support the Institute, extending the reach and impact of humanities and the liberal arts. Murphy was the youngest person in the University’s history to make such a large gift. Read more

Conference on the intersections of poetry, science and art, May 13-16

Art and science will come together at Entanglements: A Conference on the Intersections of Poetry, Science, and Art next week from May 13-16.

The 2019 Reynolda Conference at Wake Forest will bring together a diverse range of 10 leading poets, scientists, artists, and scholars from around the world whose work and/or teaching engages with trans-disciplinary investigations into shared principles and methods in literature, science and art.

Featured presenters will be joined by Wake Forest faculty and staff presenters, special guests, visiting attendees and the generalpublic for three days of innovative programming.

The conference is free. No registration is required. A schedule is available here.

Entanglements is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation with an award granted to the conference convener, Amy Catanzano, by the Wake Forest University Humanities Institute and the Reynolda House Museum of American Art.

Additional sponsors are the Wake Forest University Humanities Institute with a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Creative Writing Minor in the Department of English, and the Interdisciplinary Performance and the Liberal Arts Center (IPLACe) at Wake Forest University.

Entanglements is named after the quantum mechanical phenomenon of entanglement in which states of subatomic particles are intertwined with each other despite being spatially separated.

Categories: Inside WFU

Conference on Muslim identity in South Asia to be held Sept. 15-16

M. Raisur Rahman

A two-day workshop/conference to focus on the issue of Muslim identity in South Asia will be held Sept. 15-16 at Reynolda House Museum of American Art.  The workshop is entitled “Locality, Genre, and Muslim Belonging in South Asia. ” It is organized by M. Raisur Rahman, associate professor of history at Wake Forest, and Razak Khan, research fellow at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies in Gottingen, Germany.

The workshop will be free and open to the public.  No registration is required.

According to organizers, as the year 2017 marks the 70th anniversary of India’s independence and partition, the comparative and interdisciplinary framework of the workshop hopes to build new dialogues across borders on shared and divergent trajectories of Muslims in South Asia.

Wake Forest sponsors for the workshop include the Provost’s Office for Global Affairs, the Department of History, the Middle East and South Asia Studies Program, and the Humanities Institute. Other sponsors include the American Institute of Pakistan Studies and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

For additional information, visit college.wfu.edu/history/locality.

Categories: EventsFaculty News

Dean Franco named director of Humanities Institute

dean.franco.300x175Professor of English Dean J. Franco has been named director of the Wake Forest University Humanities Institute beginning January 2017. The Institute, which was established in 2010, supports humanities scholarship which draws on disciplines like philosophy, literature, religion, history, and other fields to interpret the human experience, understand our world, and engage the issues of our time.

In the past six years, nearly 200 College faculty from 35 departments and programs across the humanities, natural and social sciences, and the arts, and 30 faculty from law, medicine, divinity and business, have collaborated with the Institute — helping bring together top scholars and leaders to produce new scholarship, inspire new directions in teaching, and demonstrate how the humanities can inform and impact important issues of our time, such as:

  • Envisioning a community that protects the world’s citizens from the effects of climate change — especially the poorest countries and communities.
  • Addressing the challenges of mass incarceration and the criminal justice system.
  • Recognizing the importance of humanities training for the future of medicine and exploring holistic healing through storytelling and narrative medicine.

Franco along with Mary Foskett, Wake Forest Kahle Professor of Religious Studies; Sally Barbour, professor of Romance Languages; and David Phillips, associate professor of Interdisciplinary Humanities — laid the groundwork and secured the funding that made the Institute possible.

“Having played a leading role in the Humanities Institute since its inception, Dean is perfectly poised to become the Institute’s next director,” said Foskett, the Humanities Institute founding director. “He will not only carry on its mission, which he helped craft, he will infuse the Institute with his unique combination of brilliance, creativity, vision, and energy. I can’t wait to see what the Humanities Institute will do with Dean leading it forward.”

The Institute has also supported transformational programming in the College such as the Interdisciplinary Humanities Pathway to Medicine Program, which offers guaranteed admission to Wake Forest School of Medicine for up to five undergraduates majoring in the humanities or fine arts, and new interdisciplinary initiatives like a growing digital humanities community at Wake Forest.

Wake Forest was recently awarded a $650,000 grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in support of engaged humanities – teaching, learning, mentoring and real-world problem solving that moves beyond the classroom. With support from this grant, the Humanities Institute will offer new programming in narrative medicine and will collaborate with Reynolda House Museum of American Art to host new scholarly conferences.

“I am excited about working with Reynolda House to implement the Mellon Grant funded Reynolda Conferences in 2018 and 2019,” Franco said. “This is a dream scenario — the opportunity to assemble scholars working on the same sets of questions for extended, deep learning.”

Franco joined Wake Forest 2001. He directs the Jewish Studies minor, has recently served as associate chair of the English department, and was the Scott Family Faculty Fellow from 2012-2014. He researches and publishes on race and literature.

Read more…

Humanities Institute established

Humanities Institute lands 500K grant

Humanities Institute receives $1 million donation

 

September 2016 staff milestones

See a list of faculty and staff milestones in September 2016:

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