The Willson Center
2021 - 2022
ANNUAL REPORT
The Willson Center
2021 - 2022 ANNUAL REPORT
The Willson Center
2021 - 2022 ANNUAL REPORT
The Willson Center
2021 - 2022 ANNUAL REPORT
The Willson Center
2021 - 2022 ANNUAL REPORT
Nicholas Allen
Baldwin Professor in Humanities
Director, Willson Center for Humanities and Arts
Dear friends,
One of the great pleasures of learning derives from the constant exchange between curiosity and discovery, one of the great rewards of which is the creation of community. As I look over all that you have achieved in the humanities and arts at the University of Georgia this past year, I am proud again to be a part of this innovative, diverse, and evolving enterprise, which touches so many people in so many ways. This report gives a small sense of the collective work we undertake and offers a brief glimpse of its unfolding possibilities. In reading it I’d like you to know how grateful we are in the Willson Center for your friendship, your support, and your ideas, which together make the foundation for our collective success.
Welcome from
Our Director
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Welcome from our Director
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Nicholas Allen
Baldwin Professor in Humanities
Director, Willson Center for Humanities and Arts
Dear friends,
One of the great pleasures of learning derives from the constant exchange between curiosity and discovery, one of the great rewards of which is the creation of community. As I look over all that you have achieved in the humanities and arts at the University of Georgia this past year, I am proud again to be a part of this innovative, diverse, and evolving enterprise, which touches so many people in so many ways. This report gives a small sense of the collective work we undertake and offers a brief glimpse of its unfolding possibilities. In reading it I’d like you to know how grateful we are in the Willson Center for your friendship, your support, and your ideas, which together make the foundation for our collective success.
This year marks my tenth as Director of the center. I did not imagine we would have come so far in this time, or that I would have made so many friends along the way. Our work extends from campus into the community, the state, the nation, and the world, and is to me the heartbeat of the university. This report shares some of the ways in which the University of Georgia excels in its humanities and arts research and practice, from promoting vaccine awareness through the painting of public murals to receiving another fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation for exemplary historical work. Our Mellon Foundation projects continue to thrive too, and this summer saw the first of our new and exciting research residencies with our friends at Penn Center, which you can read about below.
More than anything I want to say thank you. Our work is the imagination of togetherness, in art, literature, dance and philosophy, our ambition the raising of all our voices in shared conversation. That we proceed with positivity and optimism is a register of your support and your commitment, the results of which this report makes clear. Here’s to another uplifting year together.
As always,
Nicholas
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“There is so much happening at the Willson Center that it is impossible to capture in one short passage its many contributions to our University, to our community, to our state, and beyond. But if I had to pick just one word to describe the Center, it probably would be ‘alive.’”
Dan Coenen
Co-Chair, Willson Center Board of Friends
Video from “The Praise House Project: Remembrance as Resistance, Preserving Black Narratives”
Projected music and video installation by Charmaine Minniefield
Chapel of Ease, St. Helena Island, SC
April 30, 2022
Part of Culture and Community at the Penn Center National Historic Landmark District partnership program
There is so much happening at the Willson Center that it is impossible to capture in one short
passage its many contributions to our University, to our community, to our state, and beyond.
But if I had to pick just one word to describe the Center, it probably would be "alive."
For me, the Center is just that. It is alive in energetically, even relentlessly, promoting the arts
and humanities as critical elements of our individual and societal well-being. It is alive in helping
poets and novelists and musicians and visual artists share with all of us the gifts of their creative
spirits. It is alive in simply bringing good people together to share in and celebrate art and
literature and philosophy and academic insights on these subjects and others. It is alive in
proactively reaching out to those among us – including hip-hop artists, members of indigenous
communities, and Georgians located in remote or rural areas of the state – who too often in the
past have not had a seat at the table of our great academic institutions.
The Center is alive in many other ways as well, all because the remarkably talented and caring
individuals who oversee its operations work day in and day out to promote the arts and
humanities in ways that are genuinely meaningful in the real world.
Dan T. Coenen
University Professor
Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor
Harmon W. Caldwell Chair in Constitutional Law
University of Georgia School of Law
Sally and Dan Coenen
Co-Chairs, Willson Center Board of Friends
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The mission of the Willson Center is to promote research, practice, and creativity in the humanities and arts. It supports faculty and students through research grants, lectures, symposia, publications, visiting scholars, visiting artists, collaborative instruction, public conferences, exhibitions, and performances. It is committed to academic excellence and public impact.
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ADMINISTRATION
BOARD OF FRIENDS
FACULTY ADVISORY BOARD
About the Willson Center
Culture and Community at the Penn Center National Historic Landmark District
The Willson Center’s partnership with South Carolina’s Penn Center had its first year of public programs, including community conversations and on-site classes and workshops with students and faculty from colleges and universities across the Southeast. The partnership project is funded by a $1 million grant to the Willson Center by the Mellon Foundation.
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Penn Center Campus, St. Helena Island, South Carolina
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Students, faculty, and guests participate in a workshop on indigo dyeing led by Maurice Bailey and Nik Heynen at Penn Center during Student Research Residencies, June 2022.
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Artist Lisa Rivers presents to students on her exhibition of paintings in the York W. Bailey Museum at Penn Center during Student Research Residencies, June 2022.
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Praise House (replica structure), Mitchelville Freedom Park, Hilton Head Island, South Carolina
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Ahmad Ward, executive director of Mitchelville Freedom Park, talks with students, faculty, and other participants in an educational visit to the site of the historic Mitchelville community on Hilton Head Island during Student Research Residencies, June 2022.
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Artist and storyteller Natalie Daise, artist and activist Charmaine Minniefield, and Valerie Babb, Andrew Mellon Professor of the Humanities in the departments of African American Studies and English at Emory University, participate in a Penn Center Community Conversation on “Sacred Spaces: The Penn Center, Belief, and Belonging,” April 2022. Learn More
Chapel of Ease, St. Helena Island, site of Charmaine Minniefield’s projected sound and video installation, “The Praise House Project: Remembrance as Resistance, Preserving Black Narratives,” April 2022
"My Mom and her family are from John's Island, South Carolina, so they're of the Gullah culture. I really didn't know much about it because it's not taught in schools. This residency, for me, has been an eye-opener... I'm so glad I came here." Tayelor Morgan
Sophomore, College of Charleston
Participant, Student Summer Research Residencies Culture and Community at the Penn Center National Historic Landmark District Learn More
Research
The Willson Center is an active supporter of scholarly research in the humanities and arts. Its fellowships and graduate awards directly underwrite research and practice in the humanities and arts at UGA, while other grant-funded programs and partnerships provide resources and connections to those engaged in scholarship and creative activity.
DigiLab
Arts Lab
a2ru
Faculty
Achievements
& Awards
Faculty
Fellows
Research
Seminars
Research
Clusters
Graduate
Research
Awards
The Willson Center is a participating member of the Alliance for the Arts in Research Universities (a2ru), a partnership of institutions committed to ensuring the greatest possible support for the full spectrum of arts and arts-integrative research, curricula, programs, and creative practice for the benefit of all students and faculty at research universities and the communities they serve. a2ru annually hosts a national conference and an Emerging Creatives Student Summit, and creates publications including field reports and the Ground Works journal to serve as resources for arts practitioners and scholars.
a2ru
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Cassia Roth, associate professor of history and Latin American and Caribbean
studies, won the 2021 Murdo J. MacLeod Book Prize from the Southern Historical Association,
Latin American and Caribbean Section, and a 2021 Choice Award for Outstanding Academic
Title from the American Library Association, for her book A Miscarriage of Justice: Women’s
Reproductive Lives and the Law in Early Twentieth-Century Brazil.
Humanities and arts faculty and students at UGA continued to showcase the world-class
quality of their research, teaching, and public engagement during the 2021-22 academic year,
once again collecting highly competitive national and international honors and awards across a
variety of fields.
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Faculty Achievements & Awards
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“Moments Between Dog and Wolf”
Glazed porcelain, china paint, ceramic decals, copper, bronze
Isys Hennigar MFA 2022,
Lamar Dodd School of Art
From Dodd 2022 MFA exhibition Mainstream Athenaeum
Graduate Research Awards provide support toward research-related expenses for arts
and humanities projects that are essential components of a graduate degree program. Application
is open to any humanities and arts graduate student registered for an advanced degree.
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Graduate Research Awards
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Willson Center Research Seminars support faculty organizing year-long interdisciplinary
discussion groups on particular research topics. Seminars bring scholars from other institutions
to the UGA campus.
Kira Thurman, assistant professor of Germanic languages and literatures and history
at the University of Michigan, gave a talk on her book, Singing Like Germans: Black Musicians
in the Land of Bach, Beethoven and Brahms (Cornell University Press, 2021), on January 26,
2022 as part of the History and Gender Workshop, a Willson Center Research Seminar.
Research Seminars
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Paulin Soumanou Vieyra and the African Cinema Group in Paris, 1955
From the book project Reclaiming Realism: From Documentary Film in Africa to African Documentary Film, under contract with Indiana University Press
Rachel Gabara, Associate Professor of French
Department of Romance Languages
Image courtesy of Stéphane Vieyra and PSV-Films
Willson Center Fellows are selected by an interdisciplinary UGA committee of
distinguished artists and scholars. Fellowships support excellence in the humanities and arts by
providing faculty with time to engage in research and creative activity.
Faculty Fellows
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Ideas for Creative Exploration presented a talk by design scholar and practitioner Silas Munro on “W.E.B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America” on November 11, 2021. Ideas for Creative Exploration is an interdisciplinary initiative for advanced research in the arts at UGA, supported in part by a Willson Center Faculty Research Cluster.
The Willson Center Faculty Research Cluster program supports groups of faculty who
are organized to address large-scale humanities and arts questions in partnership with colleagues
from allied departments, colleges, centers, and institutes.
Research Clusters
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The Willson Center Digital Humanities Lab, part of the Digital Humanities Initiative of
the UGA Libraries, the Willson Center, and the UGA Press, is an instruction space as well as an
incubator and publicity hub for nationally recognized digital humanities projects. Opened in
2015, it is outfitted with flexible workspaces for individual or collaborative projects and with
advanced technological resources.
DigiLab
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“Pine Prairie Detention Center, Pine Prairie, LA, Detainee Capacity 700, Town Population 1331”
From “Restore the Night Sky” project 2021-22 Arts Lab Faculty Fellow Marni Shindelman
Associate Professor of Photography Lamar Dodd School of Art
The UGA Arts Lab is a new, multi-year initiative spearheaded by the University of
Georgia Arts Council to enhance research, practice and community engagement in the arts. One
of its functions is to award Arts Lab Fellowships to faculty and graduate students which facilitate
research and practice projects.
Arts Lab
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“The much-needed uninterrupted time for research that the fellowship afforded me gave me a chance to generate new ideas and to further develop existing ones. It also allowed me time to think about better, more effective ways to articulate my big-picture ideas to potential audiences and as the result, I am now in a better position to apply for other external research grants and fellowships.”
Mi-Ryong Shim
Assistant Professor Department of Comparative Literature and Intercultural Studies
On her Willson Center Faculty Research Fellowship
The Willson Center, working with faculty representatives of the UGA Arts Council, was awarded a grant from the CDC Foundation to help increase vaccine confidence through community participation in the arts. The project, “Listening, Performance, and Murals: Using Theatre and Painting to Support Vaccine Confidence in Athens, Georgia,” included the creation of three murals in a local public high school and a community-wide TikTok competition. Promoting Vaccine Confidence through the Arts
A mural promoting vaccine confidence painted by UGA students in Athens Community Career Academy, part of a project funded by a grant from the CDC Foundation to the Willson Center.
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Global Georgia
The Global Georgia Initiative public event series brings world class thinkers to Georgia. It presents global problems in local context by addressing pressing contemporary questions, including the economy, society, and the environment, with a focus on how the arts and humanities can intervene. The Spring 2022 series was a combination of in-person and online events, many of which can be viewed on our website.
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Black Is the Journey, Africana the Name
Maboula Soumahoro in conversation with Rachel Gabara and Lesley Feracho
January 13, 2022
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Indigenous Photograph
Native American / First Nations photographers in conversation
February 2, 2022
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Quality Breweries, Quality Companies
Conversation with Creature Comforts and Bell’s Brewery February 8, 2022
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Reconsidering Reparations
Olúfẹmi O. Táíwò
February 16, 2022
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Muslim Women and Comics
Symposium with Esra Santesso and artists
February 22, 2022 Learn More
Reality+: From the Matrix to the Metaverse
David Chalmers
March 1, 2022 Learn More
Greg Bluestein in conversation with Audrey Haynes
March 29, 2022
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Outward: The Radical Legacies of Adrienne Rich
Ed Pavlić in conversation with Christine Cuomo
March 31, 2022
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Performance and talk
Martin Hayes
April 6, 2022 Learn More
A Life in Poetry
Provost’s Seminar Series
Jahan Ramazani
April 13, 2022
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The Lost Children Archive
Betty Jean Craige Lecture
Valeria Luiselli
April 13, 2022 Learn More
On the Swamp: Indigenous Erasure, Environmental Justice, and the Transformation of North Carolina’s Coastal Plain
Odum Environmental Ethics Lecture
Ryan Emanuel
April 19, 2022
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Delta Visiting Chair for Global Understanding
The Willson Center welcomed Pulitzer Prize winner and former Poet Laureate of the United States Natasha Trethewey to UGA as the 2021-2022 Delta Visiting Chair for Global Understanding. The Delta Chair program hosts outstanding global scholars, leading creative thinkers, artists, and intellectuals who engage with audiences on and off the UGA campus through lectures, seminars, discussions, and other community events.
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Shared
Programs
The Willson Center supports dozens of public events each year through recurring funded programs and special provisions. These include visiting artists and speakers, performances, screenings, discussions, and other events that are shared with the community on campus and beyond. Shelter Projects Short-Term
Visiting
Fellows Distinguished
Artists
and Lecturers Spotlight
on the Arts Special
Events
Cinema
Roundtables Public
Impact
Grants The Willson Center Distinguished Artist or Lecturer program supports individual faculty
or interdisciplinary groups in bringing leading thinkers and practitioners to campus in support of
ongoing and innovative research projects.
Distinguished Artists and Lecturers
Lisa Tan
January 12, 2022
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Collective Impressions: Modern Native American Printmakers
exhibition Georgia Museum of Art
October 16, 2021 – January 30, 2022
The Willson Center Public Impact Grant supports faculty in the organization on campus
of conferences, exhibitions, and performances that showcase humanities and arts research in a
broad context. The Public Impact Grant is designed to offer interaction between national and
international scholars and UGA faculty, students and the community.
Public Impact Grants
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Nathan Brown
March 21-23, 2022
The Willson Center Short-Term Visiting Fellows, nominated by UGA faculty, bring
distinguished artists, scholars, and performers to the arts and humanities community at the
University of Georgia. Visiting Fellows conduct intensive workshops for faculty and students,
and give public presentations of their work.
Short-Term Visiting Fellows
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The University of Georgia spotlights its arts programs and venues during an annual month-long festival in November that includes concerts, theater and dance performances, art exhibitions, poetry
readings, film festivals, discussions on the arts and creativity, and more.
Athens Poet Laureate Jeff Fallis
November 17, 2021
Spotlight on the Arts
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Cynthia Barnett
Environmental Journalist in Residence
University of Florida
Willson Center Director’s Series
September 9, 2021
The Willson Center supports numerous public events each academic year outside of its recurring grant-funded programs. Many of these events are hosted and sponsored by the Willson Center itself, or in collaboration with on- and off-campus partners. Others are hosted by faculty and/or students with Willson Center support through Research Seminars, Research Clusters, Mellon Foundation-funded Global Georgia projects, and other programs.
Special Events
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The Willson Center Cinema Roundtable meets to discuss topics of film history, criticism, and theory. Richard Neupert, Wheatley Professor of the Arts, Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor, and film studies coordinator in the Department of Theatre and Film Studies, organizes and moderates one roundtable each semester. Audiences are invited to participate and the events are free and open to the public.
Cinema Roundtables
“New French Cinema: Beyond Borders – French Women Filmmakers and Global Perspectives”
November 5, 2021
Still from The End of Love (2019), dir. Keren Ben Rafael
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In the spring of 2020 the Willson Center, in partnership with the Graduate School, the UGA Arts Council, the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, and Flagpole magazine, awarded 34 micro-fellowships in a new program, Shelter Projects. The $500 fellowships supported graduate students and community-based artists and practitioners in the creation of shareable reflections on their experience of the COVID-19 pandemic through the arts and humanities. A new round of Shelter Projects was funded for graduate students in 2021-2022.
Shelter Projects
“Entomological Epidemiology, I, Cloth Species”
Cameron Lee Winter
From his Shelter Project Entomological Epidemiology
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“I have been honored to help scholars around the world look at their research through the lens of repair. I am amazed at the human ability to change while attempting to stay the same.”
Derrick Lemons, Associate Professor of Religion, director of the Center for Theologically Engaged Anthropology, and Willson Center Religion Fellow, is the principal investigator of a five-year, $234,671 John Templeton Foundation grant researching religious change on a global scale.
Giving
Support arts and humanities programs by giving to the Willson Center. The Willson Center promotes interdisciplinary innovation, public programs, and community engagement in the arts and humanities. We support faculty and students through research grants, lectures, symposia, publications, visiting scholars, visiting artists, collaborative instruction, public conferences, exhibitions, and performances.
Give
$5,000
Supports public outreach for a community event
Supports a virtual speaker fee for an artist or scholar
Supports an in-person Department-Invited Lecturer
Supports a Graduate Research Award.
Supports a Short-Term Visiting Fellow
$100
$250
$1,250
$500
The Willson Center is a participating member of the Alliance for the Arts in Research Universities (a2ru), a partnership of over 30 institutions committed to ensuring the greatest possible support for the full spectrum of arts and arts-integrative research, curricula, programs, and creative practice for the benefit of all students and faculty at research universities and the communities they serve.
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a2ru
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Nik Heynen
Professor, Department of Geography
University of Georgia Distinguished Research Professor 2021
(Photo: Rinne Allen)
The University of Georgia faculty and graduate students in the humanities and arts have great
success at winning awards and fellowships from national and international organizations, in
addition to internal UGA honors.
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Faculty Achievements & Awards
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“Bloom,” steel, 9 ½’ x 4 ½’ x 4’
Kelsey Wishik, MFA Candidate
Lamar Dodd School of Art
From MFA Exhibition: Bloom
Graduate Research Awards provide support toward research‐related expenses for arts and humanities projects that are essential components of a graduate degree program. Application is open to any humanities and arts graduate student registered for an advanced degree.
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Graduate Research Awards
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Willson Center Research Seminars support faculty organizing year-long interdisciplinary discussion groups on particular research topics. Seminars bring scholars from other institutions to the UGA campus.
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Religion and the Common Good
Organizers: Robert L. Foster (Religion), Joshua Patterson (Institute of Higher Education)
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Research Seminars
Elizabeth Bishop in Key West, ca. 1937
Experimental Bishop
Susan Rosenbaum
Associate Professor
Department of English
(Photo: Elizabeth Bishop Papers, Vassar College)
Willson Center Faculty Fellows are selected by an interdisciplinary UGA committee of distinguished artists and scholars. Fellowships support excellence in the humanities and arts by providing faculty with time to engage in research and creative activity.
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Faculty Fellows
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Flyer for DIGI Colloquium March 26, 2021
From DIGI: Willson Center Digital Humanities Lab
Director: Emily McGinn Head of Digital Humanities UGA Libraries
Faculty Research Clusters support groups of faculty who are organized to address large-scale humanities and arts questions in partnership with colleagues from allied departments, colleges, centers, and institutes. The program is designed to build research capacity in the humanities and arts and increase the profile and competitiveness of faculty for grants and support.
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UGA Arts Lab Cluster
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