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Denbo Center for Humanities and the Arts

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  • About
    • About the Center
    • Find Us
    • Meet Our Team
    • News & Media
  • Programs
    • Big Hairy Grants
    • Conversations & Cocktails
    • Distinguished Lecture Series
    • Research Seminars
    • Special Events
    • Calendar
  • Initiatives
    • Digital Humanities
    • Energy Humanities
    • Environmental Humanities
    • Medical Humanities
  • Fellows
    • Fellowship Program
    • Meet Our Fellows
    • Chandler Seminars
    • Fellows’ Publications
  • Resources
    • For Faculty
    • For Students
    • For Departments
  • Giving

Denbo Center Staff

UTHC Staff
Steering Committee
Heads Committee
Board of Friends
Affiliated Research Centers

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

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.


Katharine A. (Katie) Burnett

Associate Director of Transdisciplinary Programs

Contact: humanitiesctr@utk.edu

About Katie Burnett

Burnett joined the Denbo Center in 2025 as our full-time Associate Director. Her research has focused on 19th-century literature, literature of the U.S. South, and literary representations of enslavement. She is the author of Cavaliers and Economists: Global Capitalism and the Development of Southern Literature, 1820-1860 (LSU Press, 2019) and the co-editor of The Tacky South (LSU Press, 2022) and the Routledge Companion to Literature of the U.S. South (Routledge Press, 2023). Her work has appeared in the Cambridge History of the Literature of the U.S. South, the essay collection Southern Comforts, PMLA, College Literature, and the Southern Literary Journal (later south). She served as associate professor of English and the chair of the Arts and Languages Department and coordinator of the English and Gender Studies programs at Fisk University in Nashville, TN until 2025.


Communications & Marketing Coordinator – position currently open


Affiliated UT Staff

Landon Sommer

College of Arts and Sciences Business Manager

College of Arts and Sciences Finance Team working with College of Arts and Sciences Centers and interdisciplinary programs

Contact: lsommer@utk.edu


Hannah Schmidt

Hannah Schmidt

Arts & Humanities Grants Liaison

Contact: hschmidt@utk.edu


Denbo Center for Humanities and the Arts

College of Arts and Sciences

Email: humanitiesctr@utk.edu
Tel.: (865) 974-4222
2230 Sutherland Avenue
Knoxville, TN 37919
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The University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Knoxville, Tennessee 37996
865-974-1000

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