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.

Dear friends,

It has, by any measure, been a hard, puzzling summer that occasionally veered into chaotic and devastating, making it difficult to write an ordinary welcome back letter in such fraught, extraordinary times. What we’re here to say though is that it is our intention to continue to offer forums to learn, talk, and listen, opportunities to think harder, and occasions to ask new questions—all as we move our programming online for the time being. We welcome you to join us as we try out new methods, explore new ways to connect intellectually, and create collaborative cohorts. In short, UCHI offers this year what we offer every year: opportunities to shape the humanities. More than ever, we want to remind you that your research, your ideas, and your voices matter and can change the world.

What does this mean tangibly? It means we are going to continue to do what we do and even expand our reach in this online moment. This includes:

1. UCHI Fellows’ talks and all activities will go online. The formats will shift, but Fellows’ talks remain an opportunity to hear cutting-edge researchers and their new material. Join us to see the best new books, articles, and dissertations take shape.
2. We have funding and look forward to supporting scholars’ talks, colloquia, working groups, and other research events. Again, while travel is limited, online options offer new potentials for expanding and diversifying the dialogues we can share here with the UConn community.
3. Our Digital Humanities and Media Studies initiative will continue to offer programming that addresses our (more than ever) digitally-mediated world and scholarship, as well as its graduate certificate program.
4. Our programs such as faculty grant application aid and humanities book support remain active and wait for your applications.
5. We were awarded this summer a $750,000 Mellon grant to build and sustain the New England Humanities Consortium’s Faculty of Color Working Group (FOCWG). This program will offer fellowships, mentorship, and advocacy in support of BIPOC faculty here at UConn and then also nationally. UCHI remains committed to working for equality, diversity, and change here at UConn and beyond.
6. As part of this Mellon/FOCWG we are thrilled to welcome our first UCHI/Mellon Faculty Fellow, Professor Sean Frederick Forbes. For more on Sean and all our 2020-21 fellows see our site.
7. Publishing NOW will again bring top editors to talk with UConn faculty and students about publishing and about projecting their scholarly voices in new publishing environments.
8. Our Luce Foundation funded initiative, The Future of Truth, will host several events this year building toward our multi-year traveling exhibition, in collaboration with the American Museum of Natural History, Seeing Truth: Art, Science, and Making Knowledge.

And is there something here you don’t see but that would help you and your colleagues now? Reach out to us. Again, we are here, and want to see you get to where you need to go. We’re eager to learn about the work you’re doing this year and to support your projects.

Best wishes for the start of the new school year.

Cheers,

The UCHI Team

Alexis L. Boylan, acting director
Yohei Igarashi, acting director of academic affairs
Jo-Ann Waide, program coordinator
Nasya Al-Saidy, financial coordinator
Elizabeth Della Zazzera, post-doctoral humanities fellow