Phoebe Zerwick HI Tenth Anniversary Tribute

I joined the faculty at Wake Forest in 2010, just as the Humanities Institute was getting started. I was new to academia, having spent my career in daily journalism, a field that doesn’t fit neatly into a single academic discipline. While my colleagues in the English Department and what was then a small Writing Program welcomed me warmly, I felt myself to be an outsider. The role was familiar to me, as journalists often work on the outside, but it’s nice to have an intellectual home. When Dean Franco asked me to write a tribute, I realized that the HI has been that place for me.

I’ll start with my creative work, which in my case means storytelling. Mostly I’m a writer, but with support from the HI, I’ve been able to produce community-based, multimedia projects in collaboration with a local photographer. I have spent hours getting to know six adults with developmental disabilities, many of whom could barely speak, for a project we called “Story of My Life.” The project opened at the Sawtooth School for Visual Art gallery in 2013 and eventually traveled to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History for a weekend celebration of academic work by ACC schools. It was a highlight of my life to be in Washington DC with the subjects of these stories. The HI also supported “Dance for the River,” a traveling exhibit and film, to raise awareness about the Yadkin River by filming dancers as they responded to the rover and its tributaries. The financial support, of course, made these collaborations possible. As importantly, my colleagues at the HI helped me frame these projects in ways that gave them depth and meaning.

The institute has also shaped my teaching in ways I hadn’t thought about until now. With support from the HI, I’ve developed a course with the director of the Innocence & Justice Clinic at the Law School on the intersection of narrative, law, and journalism, which has provided undergraduates with first-hand experience working on cases of wrongful conviction. Many have called this work transformative. That collaboration has led to a course planned for next year for law students and undergraduates that will examine institutional racism and the law. Finally, Dean Franco’s support of journalism as a form of humanistic inquiry has helped me develop the study of Journalism at Wake as a truly interdisciplinary subject. All this is a long way of saying that the institute has been my intellectual home on campus, a source of inspiration and friendship. For that I am deeply grateful.

Phoebe Zerwick