Dear colleagues,
Love, we have been taught to believe, is a unifying force. Yet we don’t have to look far to see love deployed as a wedge that drives people apart. From local school board meetings to presidential stump speeches, love is too often wielded as a weapon. Adults insist that love for their children means that the outside world should be kept at bay; love for one’s own political community requires viewing opponents as enemies, and love of our own comfort keeps us from taking care of the earth and the generations that will succeed us. The humanities have created the definitions of love that we have inherited, and, we believe, the humanities offer us hope for reaffirming our love for justice, for democracy, and for one another.
Love and its many forms will be a theme this year as our new leadership team welcomes you back for the start of another season of collaboration, creativity, and community here at the Institute. Together we will consider how we can care for one another through works of art, acts of service, and by embracing hope for the future we can create.
We are particularly excited to offer two new initiatives that explore love as it emerges in storytelling and in caretaking. The Popular Culture Initiative (headed by Stephen Dyson) explores the narratives that win the love of wide audiences to ask what these acts of imagination can tell us about our evolving sense of the human. The Medical Humanities and the Arts Initiative (headed by Heather Cassano) insists that we need to consult a humanistic perspective if we are going to determine how we can best care for one another.
In addition to our fellowship opportunities, we are committed to furthering faculty success at every stage as we offer book manuscript workshops, coaching, and other resources designed to help faculty to lean into their strengths as writers and researchers.
Of particular interest in the weeks to come:
- 9/8, 1:00pm: Virtual Open House. Learn about our current offerings and collaborate with us as we find new ways to support faculty!
- 10/19, 4:00pm: A Daughter’s Long Goodbye, dir. Steven Smith. Film screening and discussion.
- 10/20, 1:00pm: Dealing with Resistance, with Jane Elliott. A zoom workshop that offers community as faculty members navigate difficult workloads, as well as concrete options for moving forward.
- 10/23, 4:00pm: Can you fall in love with ChatGPT? A panel discussion about the movie Her (2013), dir. Spike Jonze.
This year, we welcome a stellar group of fellows to the Institute, working on projects ranging from documentary films on migration, to legal strategies against hate speech, to monographs on early American literature. We are especially excited to welcome our undergraduate fellows. Under the capable leadership of Elizabeth Della Zazzera, we have doubled the size of this program, and look forward to working with this talented group of successful students.
As always, we continue to accept applications for funding for research, collaboration, and invited speakers all across campus, and we remind you that applications for our residential fellowships are due in February.
Keep up with everything we’re doing by following us on social media and subscribing to our newsletter: s.uconn.edu/subscribe. We suspect you will find much to love about what’s going on at UCHI this year!
Wishing everyone an excellent start to this academic year,
Anna Mae Duane and the UCHI Team.
