The Willson Center Public Impact Grant is sponsored by University of Georgia. Supports faculty-led initiatives organizing conferences, exhibitions, and performances showcasing humanities and arts research.

Public Impact Grants – Willson Center for Humanities and Arts Welcome from the Director 30 Faces of the Humanities and Arts Willson Center Board of Friends Distinguished Artist or Lecturer Global Georgia Public Events Series Odum Environmental Ethics Lecture Short-Term Visiting Fellows Felson Faculty Writing Retreat Coastal Humanities: Geographies of Abundance and Repair Interdisciplinary Modernisms Workshop Interdisciplinary Solutions to Modern Challenges: Ecological Science, Environmental Law, and the Environmental Humanities UGA Arts Collaborative / Alliance for the Arts in Research Universities Arts Lab Graduate Fellows Atlantic Archipelagos Research Consortium 2023 UGA Humanities Festival 2024 UGA Humanities Festival 2025 UGA Humanities Festival 2026 UGA Humanities Festival Culture and Community at Penn Center Delta Visiting Chair for Global Understanding Coasts, Climates, the Humanities, and the Environment Consortium Voices of Resilience and Recovery in Robeson County (UNC-Chapel Hill) Global Georgia Initiative Public Event Series Global Georgia Initiative – Mellon Foundation Grant Funded Programs Global Georgia Initiative – Georgia Humanities Symposium Global Georgia Initiative – Global Georgia Program Research Projects Global Georgia Initiative – Humanities in Place The Athens African American Oral History Initiative Franklin Residential College at Gospel Pilgrim Cemetery The History of Slavery at UGA NEH Common Heritage Grant: “Sharing Our Stories” NEH Humanities Access Challenge Grant National Humanities Alliance Community Impact Initiative Willson Center Grants and Awards Support for Faculty Writing and Applying for Major Grants and Fellowships External Grants and Fellowships UGA Graduate School External Fellowships Resources Major Arts and Humanities Grant Resources Post-doctoral and Graduate Student Funding Resources Recent External Grants, Fellowships, and Awards Book Research and Publication Resources The Willson Center Public Impact Grant supports faculty in the organization on campus of conferences, exhibitions, and performances that showcase humanities and arts research in a broad context.

The Public Impact Grant is designed to offer interaction between national and international scholars and UGA faculty, students and the community. Queer Bibliography 2026: Space, Place, Community Faculty sponsor: J. D.

Sargan (English) The 2026 Queer Bibliography Conference is hosted at UGA and co-organized by the Department of English, UGA Libraries and Special Collections, Dodd School of Art, and Emory Special Collections Library. In the current political environment, the US American South is regarded as a regressive region for LGBTQ+ rights.

However, the South has a rich and thriving intersectional history, carried out and carried on by community organizations, bookstores, libraries and archives, and in private spaces. Over a third of all queer Americans reside in Southern states, 40% of whom are people of color.

Queer Bibliography in the South seeks to highlight how the dynamics of space and place (both within and outside of the American South) have influenced queer and trans bibliographic history, calling attention to the ways that the queer material presences are produced, documented, preserved, and promoted within a variety of communities: rural and urban, local and international, institutional and communitarian.

Queer Bibliography is a hybrid conference and can be attended virtually or in person. American Ballet Theatre Studio Company Faculty sponsor: Lisa Fusillo (Dance) The American Ballet Theatre Studio Company, the junior company of American Ballet Theatre, trains dancers aged 16 to 21 and prepares them for the rosters of leading ballet companies worldwide. The Studio Company appeared at UGA’s Fine Arts Theatre on Jan.

31 and Feb. 1, 2025 as part of the UGA Presents season. ABT Studio Company Artistic Director Sascha Radetsky, a star of the film Center Stage , gave a free introductory talk before each performance.

Eighty-five percent of current dancers in American Ballet Theatre are alumni of the ABT Studio Company, including eight soloists and 15 principal dancers, making the Studio Company a tested resource for prime talent. The dozen members of the Studio Company are from Ohio, California, Canada, Mexico, Venezuela, Argentina, South Korea and other locations.

ABT Studio Company serves as an ambassador for American Ballet Theatre by engaging with communities in a range of venues worldwide, performing masterworks of the classical and neoclassical canons alongside contemporary and newly created works. Each season, ABT Studio Company commissions new ballets from emerging and established choreographers. The ABT Studio Company’s visit was supported by Drs.

Stephen E. and Margaret Cramer, the Willson Center, and the University of Georgia Parents Leadership Council.

Anne Frank: A History for Today Faculty sponsor: Amanda Walls (Religion) This Public Impact Grant supports a docent training program organized by the Jewish Studies Program and the Department of Religion that will empower students to engage in public service, community outreach, and education surrounding the Anne Frank House’s traveling exhibit and experiential learning program at UGA.

The exhibit presents the story of the young woman who wrote about her experiences during the rise and spread of Nazism in Europe. Visitors will witness the conditions Anne and her family faced as assimilated Jews living under the dark cloud of Nazi occupation.

A powerful historical lens for viewing modern world issues, the exhibit illuminates Anne’s story through a tour showcasing visuals of the Frank House, the attic where she and her family hid, and the circumstances they endured. The program invites UGA undergraduates to play an integral role in the exhibit by leading guided tours. Students who serve as docents may satisfy UGA’s undergraduate experiential learning requirements.

The program provides an excellent opportunity for: engaging with UGA and Athens communities receiving museum-related training gaining experience in peer education advancing skills in historical analysis Participants will train with UGA faculty in collaboration with the University of South Carolina’s Anne Frank Center, the official U.S. partner of the Anne Frank House.

This important and timely exhibit, on display at UGA’s Hillel house in its new Baxter Street location, will be free and open to the public. Symposium on Ukrainian Art Faculty sponsor: Asen Kirin (Art) This March 27-28, 2025 symposium was sponsored by the Willson Center and co-hosted by the Georgia Museum of Art and the Lamar Dodd School of Art .

It was organized in conjunction with three exhibitions at the University of Georgia: “The Awe of Ordinary Labors: 20th-Century Paintings from Ukraine,” Georgia Museum of Art (January 18 – June 1, 2025) “Ukraine’s People Revealed,” Foundation Gallery, Lamar Dodd School of Art (February – April 2025) “Demons, Prophets, and Détente,” contemporary art installation of ceramic sculpture by Richard N.

Johnson, Foundation Gallery, Lamar Dodd School of Art (February – April 2025) Highlights of the symposium included an opening reception, a panel discussion with the curators of “Ukraine’s People Revealed,” a keynote lecture by Ukranian art expert Myroslava Mudrak and a lecture on “The Soviet Republic of Ukraine” by Joseph Kellner , assistant professor of history at UGA.

All events were free and open to the public unless otherwise indicated. For a complete symposium schedule, see the Georgia Museum of Art’s listing . Faculty sponsor: Lisa Fusillo (Dance) Dance Theatre of Harlem is considered “one of ballet’s most exciting undertakings” ( New York Times ).

The multi-ethnic company tours nationally and internationally with a forward-thinking repertoire that includes treasured classics, neoclassical works by George Balanchine and resident choreographer Robert Garland, and contemporary works that use the language of ballet to celebrate co-founder Arthur Mitchell’s belief that ballet belongs to everyone.

Through performances, community engagement, and arts education, the company carries forward its message of empowerment through the arts for all and presents a powerful vision for ballet in the 21st century.

The Genius of Phillis Wheatley Peters: A Poet and Her Legacies Faculty sponsors: Barbara McCaskill and Susan Rosenbaum (English) The Genius Of Phillis Wheatley Peters: A Poet and Her Legacies is a year-long partnership project by the University of Georgia and Texas Christian University on the occasion of the 250th anniversary of the 1773 publication of Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral .

It embodies both an honoring of the poet and her legacies, and an opportunity to spotlight the learning power and the significance of literature in our lives. Through the partnership of UGA and TCU, this project also celebrates the efficacy of collaborative learning informed by a participatory vision of the humanities and the arts. Its co-directors are Barbara McCaskill of UGA, and Mona Narain and Sarah Ruffing Robbins of TCU.

They have co-edited a volume of eighteen essays from the project in The Life, Writing and Legacies of Phillis Wheatley Peters (Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming 2026). Honorée Fannone Jeffers , professor of English at the University of Oklahoma, gave a presentation in November 2023 as part of the Phillis Wheatley project.

Dr. Jeffers has roots in Eatonton, Georgia, Alice Walker’s hometown, and has become celebrated for her poetry collection inspired by Wheatley, The Age of Phillis , and her novel The Love Songs of W. E. B.

Du Bois. Nancy Baker Cahill: Through-lines Faculty sponsor: Anna Conrad (Georgia Museum of Art) “Nancy Baker Cahill: Through Lines” highlights the artist’s interdisciplinary artistic practice and the role of emerging technologies in contemporary art. Nancy Baker Cahill’s work examines ideas of systemic power, consciousness, the human body and the impact of humans on the biosphere.

This mid-career survey exhibition is Baker Cahill’s first solo museum show. Expanding upon her background in traditional media, the artist redefines the possibilities of drawing in contemporary art. She begins with finely rendered graphite drawings that evolve into torn paper sculptures, then scans and animates them into 3D digital immersive videos.

The drawings, altered by software, later reappear as single cinematic frames in the form of fine art prints. “Through Lines” moves across spatial dimensions and media, following Baker Cahill as she investigates materiality and immateriality through her progression from drawing into digital works of art in augmented reality (AR).

Featuring drawings, sculptural installations and single- and multichannel videos, the exhibition traces Baker Cahill’s mark-making from traditional modes of artistic production into technologized ones. The works invite reconsiderations of fine art and the art historical canon in the face of emerging technologies while examining site, time and space as they relate to the physical body, the digital, the permanent and the ephemeral.

“Through Lines” invites guests and viewers to interact with art outside traditional brick-and-mortar exhibition spaces with an animated, geolocated AR installation in the museum’s Jane and Harry Willson Sculpture Garden. This monumental artwork, “Margin of Error,” imagines an inevitable and toxic outcome created by humans’ impact on the environment.

The title references the statistical probability of an event to occur, in this instance the occurrence of environmental disaster. By placing this work in the museum’s sculpture garden, the exhibition underscores consequence of the impending biological, chemical and geological disasters that will take place in our own backyards.

In the gallery, Baker Cahill’s prints “Slipstream 17” and “Slipstream 18” trigger their own AR animations, bringing static images to life as related videos. The artist’s AR works bridge the physical and virtual worlds through 4th Wall, Baker Cahill’s free AR art platform​​, allowing viewers to interact with and document themselves with the work.

Through their visceral and temporal qualities, Baker Cahill’s AR works help viewers visualize what philosopher Timothy Morton calls “hyperobjects”: entities of such monumental scale and complexity that they often defy conventional modes of human understanding. By rendering the invisible visible, the artist challenges perception and reveals the unmarked, untold and unimagined.

Complexions Contemporary Ballet Faculty sponsor: Lisa Fusillo (Dance) Founded nearly 30 years ago by two Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre alumni, Complexions Contemporary Ballet is a diverse and athletic company that has performed on five continents and in more than 20 countries. Over the course of four performances at UGA’s Fine Arts Theatre on Sept.

29 and 30, audiences young and older were transfixed by the group’s explorations of music by Lenny Kravitz (“Love Rocks”) and J. S. Bach and his son C.

P. E. Bach (“Hissy Fits”).

In addition to the performances for a general audience at 7:30 p. m. each night, area students attended Piedmont Athens Regional Performances for Young People at 10 a.

m. The Genius of Phillis Wheatley Peters: A Poet and Her Legacies Faculty sponsors: Barbara McCaskill and Susan Rosenbaum (English) The Genius Of Phillis Wheatley Peters: A Poet and Her Legacies is a year-long partnership project by the University of Georgia and Texas Christian University on the occasion of the 250th anniversary of the 1773 publication of Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral .

It embodies both an honoring of the poet and her legacies, and an opportunity to spotlight the learning power and the significance of literature in our lives. Through the partnership of UGA and TCU, this project also celebrates the efficacy of collaborative learning informed by a participatory vision of the humanities and the arts.

Its co-directors are Barbara McCaskill and Susan Rosenbaum of UGA, and Mona Narain and Sarah Ruffing Robbins of TCU. The partnership program’s opening event on January 31, 2023 was a scholarly roundtable featuring speakers from TCU and UGA faculty in British studies, American studies, transatlantic studies, and related fields.

The panelists were, from TCU, Brandon Manning, who located Wheatley Peters’ place in African American literary history, and Linda K. Hughes, who reflected on Wheatley Peters’ crucial place in women’s transatlantic poetry. From UGA, David Diamond, English and African American Studies, considered Wheatley Peters’ original reception in and connections with Britain.

Additionally, Zanice Bond from Tuskegee University’s English department addressed Wheatley Peters’ impact on and relevance to civil rights and social justice issues. This event was conducted online as a free and public Zoom webinar.

Exhibition: Collective Impressions: Modern Native American Printmakers Faculty sponsor: Jeffrey Richmond-Moll (Georgia Museum of Art) This exhibition examines the individuals, communities and institutions central to elevating printmaking as a medium among Native American artists during the second half of the 20th century.

As a nontraditional art form among Indigenous artists, printmaking has continually offered a dynamic means of modernist experimentation, communal engagement and social commentary. The exhibition provides an overview of this history, while also considering concepts like ritual, gender, humor, power, memory and dispossession and exile. Such themes are especially well suited to this paper-based medium.

As Choctaw/Chickasaw art historian heather ahtone notes, Native printmakers took up paper — the material that Western legal culture used to dispossess tribes of rights, lands and languages — as a means of survivance, sustaining native stories and renouncing narratives of domination or tragedy.

“Collective Impressions” features an influential group of Indigenous artists, from some of the earliest to engage with the medium, like Awa Tsireh and Gerald Nailor, to a group of more humorous and satirical artists, like Fritz Scholder, T. C. Cannon and Jaune Quick-to-See Smith.

The exhibition also highlights a large number of Cherokee, Muscogee (Creek) and Yuchi artists, including Bobby C. Martin, America Meredith, Kay WalkingStick and Richard Ray Whitman, whose works address history, memory and belonging. These are crucial questions for the Georgia Museum of Art, given that our university and museum stand on the ancestral homelands of these tribes.

Exhibition: Emma Amos: Color Odyssey Faculty sponsor: Shawnya Harris (Georgia Museum of Art) This survey exhibition included approximately 60 works produced by artist Emma Amos over the last 60 years. Born in Atlanta, Georgia, Emma Amos (March 16, 1937 – May 20, 2020) was a distinguished painter and printmaker.

She is best known for her bold and colorful mixed-media paintings that create visual tapestries in which she examines the intersection of race, class, gender and privilege in both the art world and society at large.

Amos, like many Black and woman artists had been given scant attention in the art world until recent years before her death in 2020 and this monographic exhibition was the most comprehensive exhibition of her over six- decade career. In addition, the exhibition also complemented research in UGA’s art history program at the Lamar Dodd School of Art as well as the departments of Women’s Studies and African American Studies.

The UGA’s Association of Graduate Art Students (AGAS) presented their 2021 Emerging Scholars Symposium, which included research by current graduate students and other emerging scholars related to themes of art and identity throughout the history of visual and material culture. The symposium was presented in conjunction with the exhibition and included a keynote by art historian, Dr. Adrienne Childs.

Faculty sponsors: Emily Koh and Peter Van Zandt Lane (Hugh Hodgson School of Music) The SPLICE Festival IV was hosted virtually due to the pandemic at the Dancz Center for New Music at the Hugh Hodgson School of Music.

The SPLICE ensemble, a group of world-class performers who specialize in performing music that fully integrates with interactive electronics, was co-hosted by Emily Koh and Peter Van Zandt Lane in the Hugh Hodson School of Music. The festival featured a keynote speech, two workshops, six presentations (2 sessions of talks), five concerts (33 composers represented), and three evenings of virtual social gatherings.

The festival brought together more than one hundred composers and performers, including five UGA students/alumni and two faculty ensembles—Subaerial Collective and Modular Ensemble. The festival was also supported by the Office of the Provost through a State-of-the-Art Conference Grants.

Faculty sponsor: Lisa Fusillo (Dance) AILEY II dance company, which embodies 21st century dance in its blending of dance forms and cultures in addition to the choreographic legacies representing exceptional innovation and artistic excellence, presented a series of master classes, guest lectures, and a public performance on campus.

The UGA and Athens communities experienced one of the most iconic and diverse American dance companies in the world through the legacy of Alvin Ailey’s work and through radical new contemporary choreographers. Programs events involved the Department of Dance, the Performing Arts Center, the Institute for African American Studies, and the Department of Theatre and Film Studies.

Outreach activities allowed participants of all ages to interact with these exceptional artists through community master classes at the East Athens Educational Dance Center and Dance FX. The project had a direct impact on student life at UGA as students engaged in workshops, master classes, and conversations with artistic director, Troy Powell and artists from the AILEY II company.

The Public Impact Grant also assisted in funding a free matinee performance at the Fine Arts Theatre open to all local public schools.

Indigenous Languages of South America Film Series Faculty sponsor: Tim Gupton (Romance Languages) The Indigenous Languages of South America Film Series celebrated Hispanic Heritage Month and the UNESCO International Year of Indigenous Languages with two Latin American films on indigenous languages and cultures with special introductory comments and post-screening Q & A with the films’ directors.

Film screenings included Los Ojos del Camino with director Rodrigo Otero Heraud and Lantéc Chaná with director Marina Zeising. The program was supported by the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Institute (LACSI), the Departments of Linguistics, English, Romance Languages, Theatre and Film Studies, History, and Sociology, the Institute of Native American Studies, and the Willson Cetner.

Staged Reading, Book Discussion and Writing Response – “Citizen: An American Lyric” by Claudia Rankine Faculty sponsor: Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor (College of Education) A free, two-night, staged reading of Claudia Rankine’s award-winning, multi-genre book Citizen performed by students, faculty, and community actors under the direction of Freda Scott Giles, faculty emerita of theatre and film studies and African-American studies.

The staged performance of this book lays bare moments of racism that often surface in everyday encounters. It combines poetry with commentary, visual art, quotations from artists and critics, slogans, and scripts for films. It’s “an anatomy of American racism in the new millennium” (Bookforum).

A discussion co-hosted by the College of Education’s Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine lays bare moments of racism that often surface in everyday encounters. It combines poetry with commentary, visual art, quotations from artists and critics, slogans, and scripts for films.

It’s “an anatomy of American racism in the new millennium” (Bookforum). Participants will be invited to write their own reflections on past experiences with microaggression and/or micro-validation. We imagine our individual and collective goals for future advocacy and care in our “diverse-city” of Athens, Georgia.

Copies of Citizen will be given out (one per household) to event attendees while supplies last. This event is part of This is (Not) What I Expected: Difference and Dignity Through Literature and the Arts , a series of events centered around and inspired by Citizen by Claudia Rankine. Events in the series have been supported by funds from the Willson Center, the Leighton M.

Ballew Lecture Series in English, Verse magazine, and Georgia Humanities, in partnership with the Georgia Department of Economic Development through funding from the Georgia General Assembly. M. NourbeSe Philip – “Zong!

– Talking Code, Stalking Silence” Faculty sponsor: Christine Lasek-White (Creative Writing) M. NourbeSe Philip is an unembedded poet, essayist, novelist, and playwright who lives in Toronto. She practiced law in Toronto for seven years before becoming a poet and writer.

She has published four books of poetry including the seminal She Tries Her Tongue; Her Silence Softly Breaks , one novel, and four collections of essays. Her book-length poem, Zong! , is a conceptually innovative, genre-breaking epic, which explodes the legal archive as it relates to slavery.

Her most recent work is BlanK , a collection of essays on racism and culture.

Among Philip’s awards are numerous Canada Council and Ontario Arts Council grants, including the Chalmers Award, as well as the Pushcart Prize (USA, 1981), the Casa de las Americas Prize (Cuba, 1988), the Lawrence Foundation Prize (USA, 1994), the Arts Foundation of Toronto Writing and Publishing Award (Toronto, 1995), the Dora Award (finalist, drama, 1999), and the Canada Council’s Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award (Outstanding mid-career artist.

2015). Her fellowships include Guggenheim (1990), McDowell (1991), and Rockefeller (Bellagio) (2005). She is an awardee of both the YWCA Woman of Distinction (Arts) and the Elizabeth Fry Rebels for a Cause awards.

She has been writer-in-residence at several universities and a guest at writers’ retreats. This event is sponsored by Verse magazine – the final public event in Verse ‘s 22-year history of publication – and the Creative Writing Program. It is also part of This is (Not) What I Expected: Difference and Dignity Through Literature and the Arts , a series of events centered around and inspired by Citizen by Claudia Rankine.

Other events in the series have been supported by funds from the Willson Center, the Leighton M. Ballew Lecture Series in English, and Georgia Humanities, in partnership with the Georgia Department of Economic Development through funding from the Georgia General Assembly. Heid E.

Erdrich – “Poetry, Performance, and Indigenous Citizenship” Faculty sponsor: Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor (College of Education) This event explores the connections between African-American citizenship, Claudia Rankine’s book Citizen: An American Lyric , and the indigenous poet’s experiences and reflections. It is presented by Eidson Distinguished Professor in American Literature LeAnne Howe. Featured speaker Heid E.

Erdrich is the author of five collections of poetry including Curator of Ephemera at the New Museum for Archaic Media (2017). Erdich’s nonfiction work, Original Local: Indigenous Foods, Stories and Recipes from the Upper Midwest , earned a City Pages Best Food Book of 2014 designation. Her writing has won awards from the Minnesota State Arts Board, Bush Foundation, The Loft Literary Center, and First People’s Fund.

Her book National Monuments won the 2009 Minnesota Book Award. In 2013 she was named a City Pages Artists of the Year. Erdich’s poem films have been screened at festivals and have won Best of Fest and a Best Experimental Short awards.

She is an independent scholar and curator, a playwright, and founding publisher of Wiigwaas Press, an Ojibwe-language publisher. She teaches in the MFA in creative writing program of Augsburg College. Erdrich grew up in Wahpeton, North Dakota, and is Ojibwe enrolled at Turtle Mountain.

The event will open with a reading by Josina Guess, who writes poetry, essays and reviews that explore intersections of faith, race, family and home rooted in the rural and urban landscapes of her life and memory. Her recent work as appeared in The Christian Century, Crop Stories, Communities, Sojourners, and Geez Magazine. She has two poems in the Anthology Fight Evil with Poetry Volume 1 edited by Micah Bournes and Chris Cambell.

Her essay “Putting Our Lives on the Line” is in The Wisdom of Communities Volume 4: Sustainability in Community. She is also a contributor to the forthcoming Rally: Litanies for the Lovers of God and Neighbor (Upper Room Press 2019). She lives in an old farmhouse on four acres in Comer, Georgia, with her husband Michael, and their four children.

They lived for six and a half years at Jubilee Partners, an intentional Christian community that works with refugees. This event is part of This is (Not) What I Expected: Difference and Dignity Through Literature and the Arts , a series of events centered around and inspired by Citizen by Claudia Rankine. Events in the series have been supported by funds from the Willson Center, the Leighton M.

Ballew Lecture Series in English, Verse magazine, and Georgia Humanities, in partnership with the Georgia Department of Economic Development through funding from the Georgia General Assembly. Regina E. Mason – “Gina’s Story: The Life of William Grimes as Art and Testimony” Faculty sponsor: Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor (College of Education) Author, speaker, and storyteller Regina E.

Mason is the great-great-great granddaughter of William Grimes, the author of the first published U.S. American slave narrative. Grimes was held in bondage in many states, including Georgia. Mason will discuss her journey as a researcher to recover the story of her ancestor in relation to themes of belonging and citizenship.

After an introductory discussion, she will screen her 80-minute documentary, Gina’s Journey: The Search for William Grimes (2016), which tells both Grimes’ story and the 15-year process she spent to authenticate his extraordinary narrative of flight from bondage to liberty. With the literary critic and expert William L.

Andrews, Mason also co-edited the authoritative 2008 Oxford University Press edition of The Life of William Grimes, the Runaway Slave . She has shared her work with national and international campus and university communities, including Mansfield College of Oxford, England. SUNY-Buffalo, Yale University, and the University of California-Berkeley.

This event is part of This is (Not) What I Expected: Difference and Dignity Through Literature and the Arts , a series of events centered around and inspired by Citizen by Claudia Rankine. Events in the series have been supported by funds from the Willson Center, the Leighton M.

Ballew Lecture Series in English, Verse magazine, and Georgia Humanities, in partnership with the Georgia Department of Economic Development through funding from the Georgia General Assembly. St.

EOM of Pasaquan Exhibit – Panel Presentation, Discussion and Reception Faculty sponsor: Lyndon House Arts Center The Lyndon House hosts an exhibit featuring artifacts, paintings, sculpture, wearable costumes and garments all created by Eddie Owens Martin (aka St. EOM) of Pasaquan. Pasaquan is Martin’s visionary artist environment recently restored by the Kohler Foundation.

Pasaquan is located in Buena Vista, Georgia and is overseen by Michael McFalls, professor of art at Columbus State University. This exhibit and associated events are made possibly through a Public Impact Grant from the Willson Center and are a partnership with the University of Georgia Press, which is launching the reprint of Tom Patterson’s St. Eom in the Land of Pasaquan .

The Pasaquan panel discussion welcomes Professor Michael McFalls, Columbus State University and Director of Pasaquan, historian Fred Fussell, the Pasaquan Preservation Societypresident, Annie Moye, Author Tom Patterson and others. This panel will include the story of Pasaquan, the importance of preserving visionary art and its legacy as well as tales of the extraordinary St. EOM from those who knew him well.

Conference – “Scenes in the Other’s Language” Faculty sponsor: Sujata Iyengar (English) “Scenes in the Other’s Language” is sponsored by Georgia Humanities, the Partner University Fund of the FACE Foundation, the University of Georgia, CNRS, IRCL, Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, the Willson Center for Humanities & Arts, the University of Georgia Libraries, the Athens-Clarke County Library, the departments of English, Theatre and Film Studies, and Romance Languages, the UGA Graduate School, and the UGA Office of Institutional Diversity.

Symposium – “’One Heart, One Way’: The Journey of a Princely Art Collection” Faculty sponsor: Asen Kirin (Lamar Dodd School of Art) The international symposium will accompany the exhibition of the same name at the Georgia Museum of Art.

The works included in this show date from 1660 to 1917 and were passed from one generation to the next in the same Russian aristocratic family the Princes Belosselsky-Belozersky who trace their origins to the legendary founder of the medieval state of Kievan Rus’ the Viking Prince Riurik of Jutland (reign 862-879).

In 862 Riurik bestowed on one of his two brothers the vast Belozersky (“White Lake”) domain in Northeastern Europe, hence the dynastic name. For centuries the family crest has included a motto referring to an honorable singleness of mind and action, a quote from the Book of Prophet Jeremiah 32:39—“One heart, one way.

” A Night at the Morton: Soul Celebration Faculty sponsor: Susan Thomas and Jean Kidula (Hugh Hodgson School of Music) The Athens Music Project, an interdisciplinary research initiative of the UGA Hugh Hodgson School of Music, presented an interactive performance event, supported by a Public Impact Grant from the Willson Center.

It was the third installment of the biannual program organized and directed by UGA music professors Jean Ngoya Kidula and Susan Thomas. Sponsors included the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, the Hugh Hodgson School of Music, the Institute for African American Studies, and the Morton Theatre. Soul – embraced as a lifestyle, passion, musical genre and label – was explored through interviews, performances and audience interaction.

The headliner for the event was rhythm and blues legend Theodis Ealey with an opening by jazz guitarist Victor Hodge. Other artists included soul-pop singer Ansley Stewart, an Athens native now living in Atlanta; Athens community group The Notes; and UGA Kalakaar, an a cappella student group.

Jacqueline DjeDje, emeritus professor and chair of ethnomusicology at UCLA, interviewed renowned gospel singer Sylvanus “Zeke” Turner, a native of Athens. Turner’s subsequent performance and that of the Hull