Monica Black Appointed Associate Director
Monica Black Appointed Associate Director
June 30, 2021
Monica Black, associate professor of history, will become the associate director of the UT Humanities Center August 1, 2021. “The humanities play an enormous role in the democratic mission of public universities like UT,” Black said.
“By bringing lost and marginalized stories to light, expanding our understanding of the human experience, and encouraging a productive skepticism about the world as it exists and asking how it might be different, the humanities have a capacity to transform and empower us as human beings. That is why what the UTHC does is crucial. I am so happy to be a part of it.”
Black is a historian of modern Europe whose research focuses on the cultural and social history of Germany, with an emphasis on the era of the World Wars and the decades immediately after 1945. She is the editor of the journal Central European History. Black is also the author of Death in Berlin: From Weimar to Divided Germany (2010, awarded the 2010 Fraenkel Prize and the 2011 Hans Rosenberg Prize) and A Demon-Haunted Land: Witches, Wonder Doctors, and the Ghosts of the Past in Post-WWII Germany (2020), translated and published in a Dutch edition with Brazilian, German, Polish, and Russian editions in preparation.
For his research, Professor Winford consulted previously unexamined sources from the John Hervey Wheeler Collection at the Atlanta University Center Robert W. Woodruff Library. He noted that as a 2016 UT Humanities Center Faculty Fellow, he had time and resources to complete the project, including funding to help cover publishing costs such as indexing and image copyrights for over 30 photographs.
Her research has been supported by grants and fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the American Academy in Berlin. She will be working with UTHC director Amy Elias on much of the internal programming of the Humanities Center in the coming year.
Black will replace Daniel Magilow, professor of German in the Department of Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures and outgoing associate director of the Humanities Center.
“For four years, I was the associate director at the UTHC and it was one of the most meaningful professional service roles I’ve performed at UT,” Magilow said.
“It gave me the chance to help foster an environment where humanities faculty could collaborate across disciplines and develop brilliant, cutting-edge research. And at the same time, the whirlwind of activity at the Center meant that there was always something new for me to learn as well.”
Magilow has overseen key UTHC programs supporting faculty research, including the Manuscript Review program, the Proposal Review program, the UTHC Fellowship Program, and the UTHC Steering Committee. Attending UTHC functions and supporting all UTHC activities, Professor Magilow has been key to the growth and success of UTHC programming.