Message from Director Amy Elias
by
Message from Director Amy Elias
It is such an honor to write to you at the end of this incredible building year for the Denbo Center! In our first full year at our new location at Cherokee Mills, and in the face of unsteady and often volatile national and international events as well as some key staff departures, we have been actively contributing to the research ecosystem at the University of Tennessee.
Most important this year for the future of the Denbo Center is our hiring of a new Associate Director as full time staff! Our search committee put together an amazing final slate of candidates, and Katie Burnett emerged as someone who will bring incredible experience and energy to the position. She will join us on July 1, coming from a tenured position at Fisk University. You can read about her here.
Our faculty and graduate student Fellowship Program continues successfully, and this year’s fellows shared their research at our bi-monthly Chandler Seminars. The Denbo Center continued its history of enabling completion of books and dissertations by our Fellows, and we are thrilled that our graduate student Fellows have successfully interviewed for jobs and presented their work at international conferences. We have underwritten manuscript review sessions for UT humanities faculty with external evaluators who read and reviewed their pre-publication book manuscripts, and funded attendance for faculty and graduate students at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute in Montreal. We hosted lectures on Black arts, experimental and socially engaged film, digital humanities and manuscript studies, music and jazz, and evolution. We have supported arts and humanities research through our seven research seminars, each meeting monthly during the academic year at the Denbo Center. And we have funded summer graduate student research travel for humanities graduate students as well as both faculty and graduate student summer residencies at the National Humanities Center in the Research Triangle of North Carolina.
We also have continued our energetic support of public humanities and public engagement work! We hosted the president of the Modern Language Association and Board president of the National Humanities Alliance this fall, as well as the executive boards of Big Ears Festival and Humanities Tennessee, both friends of the Center. We held reception events at the Denbo Center for community partners such as the Delaney Legacy Project and the illustrious Irving Club. We also organized a campus lecture by Menno Schilthuizen (an internationally recognized evolutionary biologist from Leiden University who has worked with Isabella Rosellini) and, to promote environmental humanities work, we underwrote a full-day bioquest for citizen scientists, public partners, humanists, and scientists led by Schilthuizen and EEB professor Liz Derryberry at Twin Creek Research Center in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. We queued up collaborative events around the Scopes Trial year with the Institute for American Civics and the College of Arts and Sciences. And we proudly hosted two open and public events at the Big Ears Festival in spring, with scholar and poet Fred Moten and jazz bassist Brandon Lopez, with Moten meeting with students, faculty, and Denbo supporters at a Denbo Center breakfast before the start of the festival.
The Center itself has invested in new grant initiatives that bring together scholars in Art, Cinema Studies, Astronomy, Physics, Africana Studies, Landscape Architecture, and Museum Curation as well as our nine arts and humanities departments. We are working to create new research programming in environmental humanities and humanities technologies, and we have partnered with national and international organizations such as Humanities Tennessee and CHCI: The Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes. We remain dedicated to collegiality, cooperation, and cutting-edge research—past, present, and possible.
I hope that through your gifts and attendance at our events, you are able to support the fine work that the Denbo Center does for the faculty and students at the University of Tennessee! We are looking at even more impressive work to come.