Mary Foskett HI Tenth Anniversary Tribute

When Dean Franco emailed me to remind me that this fall marks a significant anniversary for the WFU Humanities Institute, I could hardly believe it’s already been ten years. How could ten years have gone by so quickly? Yet after stopping for a moment to consider how much and in how many ways interdisciplinary humanities collaboration at Wake Forest has deepened and expanded since the institute’s founding, ten years seems like a remarkably brief period of time for such a culture change to have taken place.

When the institute was formally launched by President Hatch on October 1, 2010, we gathered in celebration of the work 45 faculty had done together over three years of grassroots collaborations under the umbrella of a humanities initiative that had been funded by a planning grant from the Provost’s Office. In those planning years, interdisciplinary humanities collaboration that had been nearly absent at Wake Forest had found a home. The team of faculty leading the efforts, Sally Barbour, David Phillips, Dean Franco, and myself, envisioned building on these early collaborations, which included reading groups and interdisciplinary faculty seminars focused on topics ranging from “Landscape and Place” to “Peace and Conflict Management,” that had generated panels at national conferences, new book projects, guest speakers, and new courses. Along with our faculty colleagues, we aspired to support more faculty seminars and new interdisciplinary collaborations, we hoped to reaffirm the importance of the humanities at Wake Forest, we dreamed of supporting new work in the public and digital humanities, and we sought to increase Wake Forest’s connections to national and international innovations in the humanities. Little did we know at the time that the Humanities Institute would be offered an NEH Challenge grant just two months later and would use that grant to establish an endowment for the institute’s work in all of these areas. Neither did we foresee then that the institute would play a role in securing two grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for engaged humanities at Wake Forest or that it would grow to support the work of hundreds of faculty drawn from every school in the university.

All along the way, the Humanities Institute has retained its responsive, grassroots ethos, knowing that its successes will always depend on the scholarly vision and imagination of the faculty to whom it belongs. Happy Anniversary to the Humanities Institute, with special thanks and congratulations to Director, Dean Franco, Associate Director, Aimee Mepham, and Administrative Assistant, Kimberly Scholl, for their tireless and inspired leadership!

Mary Foskett
Wake Forest Kahle Professor and Albritton Fellow
Associate Chair, Graduate Program Director
Department for the Study of Religions