 | |  |
|
|
Professor Stephen Berry Announces Grants Roundtables
Stephen Berry is the Amanda and Greg Gregory Professor of the Civil War Era in the UGA Department of History and the Willson Center's associate academic director for external grants. In that role, he is currently spearheading an initiative to make the Willson truly the central resource for grants in humanities and arts at the University of Georgia. As part of that initiative, the Willson Center will hold the first in a series of external grants roundtables and town-hall style discussions on November 5 from 4 - 5:30 pm.
In his column this month, Professor Berry writes about what gives scholarship in the humanities and arts its intrinsic value, and about how university faculty can rise to the funding challenges presented by the current budgetary environment. See below.
|
Spotlight on the Arts Coming in November
The University of Georgia's inaugural Spotlight on the Arts festival begins November 3, and the Willson Center will be well represented. The variety of Willson-sponsored festival events will be highlighted by the local premiere of the 2006 feature film Somebodies, shot entirely in Athens but never distributed theatrically.
Associate Academic Director for Arts and Public Programs Antje Ascheid will be your guide to the Willson Center's Spotlight schedule in next month's newsletter. See our slate of events here; for the complete festival schedule go here. |
|
|
|
Upcoming Events
Don't forget: our first October event is the much-anticipated Monday, October 1 talk by celebrated education writer Paul Tough at the Chapel. "Wild Things vs. Sleep Nazis: How Children's Bedtime Became a Problem," a lecture by Emory University Professor of English Benjamin Reiss, is Thursday, October 4. NEA 2012 Fiction Writing Fellow Suzanne Matson (above) will give a reading Thursday, October 11 at Ciné, and University of California Chair of Classics G.R.F. Ferrari will lecture on "The Philosophic Life in Ancient Greece" October 12. The Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company will perform Monday, October 15 at the Department of Dance. The award-winning art critic Paddy Johnson will lecture Tuesday, October 30 at the Lamar Dodd School of Art.
For a complete schedule of Willson Center events, click here.
|
Professor Honored
Well-earned congratulations to UGA Professor of English Ed Pavlić, whose latest volume of poetry, Visiting Hours at the Color Line, will be published by Milkweed Editions after he was declared a winner of the 2012 National Poetry Series. Professor Pavlić's work was supported by a 2012 research grant from the Willson Center, his second. |
|
|
|
External Grants
The Rome Prize is a fellowship awarded each year to 30 early- to mid-career artists and scholars in the humanities and arts by the American Academy in Rome. Winners study at the Academy for six or 11 months. The deadline for applications is November 15. The American Council of Learned Societies and National Humanities Center fellowships have deadlines of October 2 and October 15, respectively. The NHC fellowship application mirrors that of the Willson's faculty Research Fellowships, which have the same deadline. (See director Nicholas Allen's column in last month's newsletter.)
Farther ahead, the deadline for the Friends of the Princeton Library Research Grant is January 15, 2013. The award of up to $3,500 supports scholarly use of the library's research collections. |
|
From Associate Academic Director Stephen Berry
Dear Colleague,
I am delighted to be joining the Willson Center as associate director for external grants. I cannot remember a time when I was not passionately committed to the humanities and arts. Indeed, my career as an historian began, in some ways, when I was seven. An elementary school teacher went around the room asking us what we wanted to be when we grew up. My peers, I was startled to learn, wanted to be athletes and detectives, rock stars and millionaires. These were clearly good options, and I was disappointed not to have thought of them first. Nevertheless I meekly admitted that I wanted to be an Egyptologist, or perhaps a medievalist, or (succumbing to the need to appear a little more masculine) a wreck diver.
From an early age, there was something about the past that tugged at me. Thinking on the dead was like laying in the grass and staring at the stars. In pondering on all the people who had gone before, I felt humbled by, and yet connected to, the great and ever unfolding drama of human be-ing. These dead, I decided, had done one important thing I hadn't: they'd died. And so strangely they could teach me how to live — tell me what mistakes not to make, what promises to live up to, what prejudices to live down. Their very pastness reminded me that the world they built was bequeathed to us and we hold it in trust. Soon enough we'll be gone, too, and we must do all we can to pass on a better world to those who go on without us.
The things we really value in our lives, we do not put a price tag on. Some things are not measured that way. Some things enrich us differently, in the ways that really count.
The humanities and arts abound with those kinds of riches. But state support for them has been declining for some time. We can hope that those funds will return when the economy recovers, but it seems unlikely, especially since that support was eroding before the economic downturn. One way to offset those losses is through the pursuit of foundation and federal grants. Such a solution comes with problems of its own. Worthy projects do not always fit the funding priorities at the major agencies, and we should never stop advocating for a level of state support that helps to foster a tolerant, diverse, and erudite democracy.
But in pursuing external grants — in competing (and winning) at the national level — we help to make a collective case for the value of the humanities and arts generally and the value of the work we do here at UGA specifically. The Willson Center is committed to helping arts and humanities faculty who are interested in pursuing external grant opportunities and we will, in the coming semesters, be rolling out programs and resources that make the process of grant-getting more straightforward, communal, and engaging.
We want to involve you in the collective building of something we will all actually use, so we invite all interested humanists and artists to an external grants roundtable and town-hall style discussion to be held November 5 from 4 to 5:30 pm at a location to be confirmed. Faculty panelists who have been successful in securing funding from the larger national agencies will give short presentations, and representatives from the Office of the Vice President for Research will be on hand to answer questions about existing procedures and support for faculty applying for grants. We also hope to engage you in a discussion of what the Willson can do to help. Certainly we know that the university does not always provide the infrastructural support for competitive external grants, and we’d like to work with you to change that both quickly and effectively. To that end, we hope you will take a moment to answer a few survey questions about the kinds of programs you’d like to see in the future. We'll send the survey out in the coming weeks, along with further details about the roundtable and discussion.
Finally, please note that the next opportunity to apply for Willson Center Graduate Research Awards has a deadline of January 14, 2013. Professor Nicholas Allen, the Willson Center director, will host a workshop to answer questions on the program and give advice on effective application strategies on Wednesday, November 14 from 12:30 to 2 pm, location to be confirmed. The workshop will include a brief presentation by Kylie Horney of the History Department, whose project "From Vigorous & Bold Operations" won her this year's Janelle Padgett Knight Graduate Award. The award honors Janelle Padgett Knight, who was a lifelong resident of Georgia, teacher, and an avid supporter of higher education in the state. Current details of the Willson Center’s Graduate Research Award are available here.
Thanks for listening. The humanities and arts are the heart and soul of a flagship university. Let’s fight for their value together.
|
|
|
|
|
 | |  |
|
