Willson center for
humanities and arts
Annual Report 2024 - 2025
Welcome from the Director
“The care and thought our community in the arts and humanities put into their work open doors for people of all backgrounds into an ever-changing world.”
NICHOLAS ALLEN
About the Willson Center
The Willson Center promotes research, practice, and creativity in the humanities and arts. It supports an innovative community of scholars, artists, and practitioners with grants and fellowships, and serves the whole public through its offerings of lectures, conversations, conferences, exhibitions, and performances. It is committed to excellence, impact, and collaboration.
“It is hard to imagine life in Athens and around the university without the Willson Center and its essential and consistent programming.”
BERTIS DOWNS
Willson Center Board of Friends
Willson Center programs and events would not be possible without the generous support of our friends and donors. A gift to our new Director’s Fund in the Humanities and Arts, established in 2024, helps build the foundation of a new endowment to support the Willson Center for years to come.
HUMANITIES AND ARTS FACULTY CONTINUE SUCCESS WITH EXTERNAL AWARDS AND HONORS
UGA faculty in the humanities and arts have great success at winning awards and fellowships from national and international organizations, as well as within the university. The Willson Center offers assistance to faculty with applications for grants and fellowships, including online workshops tailored to specific opportunities.
Aruni Kashyap, associate professor of English and director of the Creative Writing Program, was a 2024-2025 Harvard Radcliffe Institute Fellow, and Yuri Balashov, professor of philosophy, was awarded a National Science Foundation grant.
Rumya Putcha, associate professor of music and women’s and gender studies, won multiple prizes for her 2024 book The Dancer’s Voice: Performance and Womanhood in Transnational India. Also in 2024, Putcha visited Ludwig-Maximilians University (LMU) in Munich through a fellowship sponsored by the Willson Center and the Office of Global Engagement, which led to a 2025 Mercator Fellowship at Katholische Universität Eichstätt-Ingolstadt.
“Because of the Willson-LMU initiative, I have been able to join dynamic intellectual conversations happening in the German academy and help nurture a new generation of scholars interested in the humanities.”
Rumya Putcha
“Since applying for the Willson Fellowship, I secured a contract with Routledge for my book Aerial Arts and Dance Improvisation: A Practical Guide to Creativity for Aerialists, and at the completion of my fellowship year, I submitted the full manuscript for peer review. The anticipated book release will be in late 2025 or early 2026.”
Elizabeth Stich
Research
The Willson Center is an active supporter of scholarly research in the humanities and arts. Its fellowships and graduate awards directly underwrite research and practice in the humanities and arts at UGA, while other grant-funded programs and partnerships provide resources and connections to those engaged in scholarship and creative activity.
UGA SETS RECORD WITH THREE SCHWARZMAN SCHOLARS
As is common with students who collect highly competitive international honors, each of UGA’s three 2025 Schwarzman Scholarship awardees has made the arts and/or humanities a key part of his or her university experience.
2025 Schwarzman Scholars: Senior Foundation Fellows Aryan Thakur, majoring in genetics and mathematics, and Amanda Whylie, majoring in entertainment and media studies, and Ramsey Honors Scholar Garrett Williams, a 2022 graduate in economics and finance.
Publications
Humanities and arts faculty and graduate students at UGA publish a diverse and impressive array of books each academic year, including works of academic research, poetry, novels, criticism, translation, and more. The Willson Center supports many of these projects through its own research programs, and by providing assistance with applications for external grants and fellowships.
Elizabeth Wright, Distinguished Research Professor of Spanish Literature in the Department of Romance Languages and Willson Center associate academic director (at right), chairs a grant-writing workshop for graduate students at the Willson Center.
SUPPORT FOR FACULTY WRITING & GRANT APPLICATIONS
The Willson Center hosts grant-writing workshops for UGA’s humanities and arts communities multiple times each academic year, organized by associate academic director Elizabeth Wright and featuring faculty guests with records of success at pursuing external grants and fellowships. The Center also oversees the Felson Faculty Writing Retreat, an informal monthly working group instituted by the UGA Humanities Council in which faculty gather to make progress on long-form writing projects and to share ideas and feedback.
UGA Arts Collaborative
The Arts Collaborative is a collective resource for UGA faculty, students, staff, and community members to foster creative, collaborative projects and advanced research in the arts, with the aim of increasing opportunities for creative collaboration at UGA and beyond.
Interim Vice President for Research Christopher King spoke to a crowd in the Athenaeum for the UGA Arts Collaborative launch celebration in October 2024.
UGA Humanities Festival
UGA presented its third annual Humanities Festival, a series of public events showcasing the richness and diversity of research and practice in the humanities throughout our extended community, March 11 – April 2, 2025. The festival was organized by the Willson Center and presented by the UGA Humanities Council.
SPOTLIGHT ON THE ARTS
The University of Georgia foregrounds its arts programs and venues during a month-long festival each November that includes concerts, theater and dance performances, art exhibitions, poetry readings, film festivals, lectures and discussions on the arts and creativity, and more.
The internationally renowned poet COLEMAN BARKS, a longtime Athenian and professor emeritus of English at UGA, gave a reading of his work in the UGA Chapel. Lisa Starr, Poet Laureate Emeritus of Rhode Island, read from her work as well and Hawkes Corbett, a fourth-year English major at UGA, gave an introduction of Barks.
The Department of Theatre and Film Studies and the Willson Center presented a screening of Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert’s 2020 documentary 9 TO 5: THE STORY OF A MOVEMENT as a tie-in event for the UGA Theatre production of 9 to 5: The Musical.
Matthew Bernstein, Goodrich C. White Professor of Film and Media at Emory University, was among the panelists of the Willson Center Cinema Roundtable AT THE MOVIES IN 1924: HOLLYWOOD VS. EUROPEAN MODERNISM.
The Willson Center and the UGA Arts Council hosted the annual SPOTLIGHT ON THE ARTS TRIVIA NIGHT, in which teams competed for fun, prizes, and glory.
Culture and Community at the Penn Center National Historic Landmark District
The Willson Center’s partnership with St. Helena Island, South Carolina’s Penn Center had its fourth consecutive year of public programs, including public conversations, an annual artist-in-residence, community fellows, and on-site research residencies with students and faculty from colleges and universities across the Southeast, as well as Michigan and the District of Columbia. The partnership project is funded by a $1 million grant to the Willson Center by the Mellon Foundation. The photographs here were taken during the 2025 research residencies by William Jenkins, Jamirika Randall, Amber Sanders, and Ashton Zow, students of Dr. Valerie Frazier (PhD English ’02, UGA) from the College of Charleston’s 1967 Legacy Program.
for Global Understanding
Robert Spano
The Willson Center and the Hugh Hodgson School of Music hosted the renowned conductor and orchestra director Robert Spano in March 2025 as the Willson Center’s annual Delta Visiting Chair for Global Understanding. Spano held a workshop for UGA student composers with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, in which students met with Spano and ASO musicians before and after a reading and rehearsal of their works by the orchestra in Atlanta Symphony Hall. Events with Spano in Athens were postponed due to illness and will be rescheduled in the coming academic year.
CLAIRE L. EVANS, singer of the Grammy-nominated pop group YACHT and a prolific writer exploring biology, technology, and culture, gave a talk on “Making Human Music with AI” followed by a conversation about creative uses of technology for music and art making with Athens musicians Marcel Sletten and Oliver Domingo of Organically Programmed. Sletten and Organically Programmed both performed after the conversation.
National Book Award winner CHARLES JOHNSON, the 2025 Betty Jean Craige Lecturer of the department of comparative literature and Intercultural Studies, read from his work and took part in a conversation with Hyangsoon Yi, professor of comparative literature and intercultural studies, and Caroline Medine, All Shall Be Well Professor in Religion and director of the Institute for African American Studies.
SEAN HEWITT, winner of the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature for his 2022 memoir All Down Darkness Wide, gave a public reading from his new novel Open, Heaven, followed by a conversation with J. D. Sargan, assistant professor of English, and an audience Q&A session. The event was presented by the Willson Center in partnership with the department of English, the Creative Writing Program, and Avid Bookshop.
Irish author FERDIA LENNON gave a reading from his 2024 debut novel Glorious Exploits, a Sunday Times bestseller and winner of the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize and the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize for comic fiction. Lennon was also shortlisted for the world’s largest and most prestigious literary award for young writers, the Swansea University Dylan Thomas Prize.
Global Georgia
The Global Georgia public event series brings world-class thinkers to Georgia. It presents global problems in local context by addressing pressing contemporary questions, including the economy, society, and the environment, with a focus on how the arts and humanities can intervene.
2025 OXBELLY RETREAT
The Oxbelly Retreat brings together writers from around the world for a week of literary and creative exchange, held at Costa Navarino in historic Messinia, Greece. The Fiction Writers program is led by Chigozie Obioma, Helen S. Lanier Distinguished Professor of English and Creative Writing at UGA and two-time Booker Prize finalist. The Willson Center helped support the 2025 Oxbelly Fiction Writers program, which took place from June 28 – July 6.
“The 2025 edition of the Oxbelly Retreats was extraordinary. Not only did we have fellows from all around the world, but we also got what I believe to be the best of today’s contemporary writers, with seven countries represented across all ten fellows. For me, this year was a major highlight of the three years since the Oxbelly Retreats expanded to include fiction.”
Chigozie Obiama
“The Willson Center Public Impact Grant enabled the UGA and Athens community to experience a live performance by the American Ballet Theatre Studio Company. The grant also provided the opportunity for UGA students to engage in ballet training with the company, which demonstrated a high level of professionalism and very thoughtful presentation… Students were thrilled and inspired to talk with company members their own age who are pursuing professional careers in dance, and the Athens community offered resounding appreciation for the company’s performances.”
Lisa Fusillo
Professor of Dance
Shared Programs
The Willson Center supports dozens of public offerings each year through recurring funded programs and special provisions. These include visiting artists and speakers, performances, screenings, discussions, and other events that are shared with the community on campus and beyond.
