Welcome to Fall 2024 at UCHI

Dear Colleagues,

As we begin a new year at the Humanities Institute (UCHI), we are delighted to welcome a new cohort of faculty, graduate and undergraduate fellows, who will spend the year working on a host of fascinating interdisciplinary research projects. We hope that you’ll join us for our weekly fellows’ talks, held on Wednesdays from 3:30–4:45 pm, with a short reception following.

As always, we are eager to support humanities research across the university and offer funding for working groups, conferences and colloquia, and book publications. Thanks to the generous support of the Office of the Vice President for Research, we are particularly proud to offer for funding for research projects that augment the work of the Mellon-Funded Faculty of Color Working Group through a focus on equity, justice, and repair.

UCHI’s theme this year is “Connections/Disconnections.” In an era defined by proliferating connections to technology and a growing loneliness epidemic marked by disconnection from one another, the humanities’ focus on the experiences and the perspectives of others illuminates how we might find community and meaning in the lives we lead. In our scholarship, in our responses to one another’s work, and in the vibrant and powerful conversations we generate in our classrooms, we build the capacity for understanding ourselves and others as we recognize the historical and cultural forces that shape our world.

Wishing you a warm welcome back to campus from myself and the whole team here at UCHI,

Anna Mae Duane
Director, UCHI