Meet Our Team

Denbo Center Staff

The Denbo Center prides itself on a staff who are committed to promoting humanistic inquiry in its many forms. The center’s faculty director works closely with the faculty associate director and the center’s full-time communications & marketing coordinator to coordinate the center’s programs and research agendas. Affiliated staff from the Office of Research, Innovation, and Economic Development (ORIED) and UT Libraries provide further research-related support, while UT’s College of Arts & Sciences financial team helps manage the administrative needs of the center.

DCHA Staff

Amy J. Elias

Director, UT Humanities Center and Chancellor’s Professor and Distinguished Professor of English

Contact: aelias2@utk.edu

About Amy Elias

Amy J. Elias is UT Chancellor’s Professor and Distinguished Professor of English and since 2017 has served as Director of the Denbo Center for Humanities & the Arts (formerly the UT Humanities Center). She earned tenure at the University of Alabama at Birmingham before coming to UTK in 2002.

Elias is the author of Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s Fiction (Johns Hopkins, 2001), winner of the George and Barbara Perkins Book Prize from the International Society for the Study of Narrative. She is also co-editor of The Planetary Turn: Relationality and Geoaesthetics in the Twenty-First Century (Northwestern, 2015), co-editor of Time: A Vocabulary of the Present (NYU Press, 2016), and editor of the forthcoming Speculative Light: The Arts of Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin (Duke, forthcoming) and authored more than 35 articles and book chapters. She was principal founder of ASAP: The Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present and the founding co-editor-in-chief of ASAP/Journal (Johns Hopkins UP). She is completing a book about speculative forms of dialogue emerging from anthropocene, decolonial, and digital environments and is beginning work on energy humanities studies.

More details.

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Katie Hodges-Kluck

Communications & Marketing Coordinator

Contact: kthomp41@utk.edu

About Katie Hodges-Kluck

Katie Hodges-Kluck is the communications and marketing coordinator for the Denbo Center (formerly the UT Humanities Center). A doctoral graduate of UT’s history program, after earning her PhD in 2015 she taught as a postdoctoral lecturer for a year in the UT History Department and worked part-time as the Humanities Center’s coordinator for undergraduate research before moving to the Marco Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies in 2016. As Marco’s program coordinator, Hodges-Kluck managed organizational communications and oversaw the administrative components of the institute’s operations and programming. She rejoined the Humanities Center full-time in May 2022.

Prior to coming to UT, Hodges-Kluck worked in public outreach and historical interpretation at Fort Sumter National Monument, Minute Man National Historical Park, and George Washington’s childhood home in Virginia. She holds an MA in history from the University of New Mexico (2008) and a BA in history with concentrations in archaeology and medieval & Renaissance studies from Carleton College (2005). In 2018, she was a finalist in the highly competitive Mellon/ACLS Public Fellows Program, an initiative promoting the visibility and value of the humanities PhD beyond the academy.

Hodges-Kluck’s research explores the role of religion, myth, and memory in shaping political ideologies and cultural identities, particularly in England during the Angevin period (1154-1216). Her work touches on topics including the crusades, apocalypticism, and legends about Richard the Lionheart, King Arthur, and Roman Britain. She has presented at numerous conferences and published in several journals, receiving the International Haskins Society’s Denis Bethell Prize for outstanding paper by a junior scholar in 2015.