Anniversaries are occasions to celebrate. . . and opportunities to take stock.
As the Director of the Institute for Humanities Research for the past five years, I have been mindful of the legacy I inherited from the institute’s previous Directors, Gail Hershatter and Jorge Hankamer, and I would like to thank them for creating such a strong foundation upon which to build.
This year the IHR is celebrating its fifteen-year anniversary. Since 1999, we have given out 69 fellowships to faculty, 148 to graduate students, 150 to undergraduate students, and have seeded 22 research clusters. Over the past decade and a half, we have grown into a vibrant hub of Humanities research on campus and a model for other Humanities centers in the University of California system. With our help, faculty and students have developed individual and collaborative research projects at the university and numerous sites around the world, with support from the Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, Fulbright, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, and more.
This year we are launching several new projects that will extend our reach both locally and globally. In September we will be hosting a gathering of scholars and students from partner institutions in Australia, Germany, and Wisconsin to explore the topic of indigeneity. The event will inaugurate the Integrative Graduate Humanities Education and Research Training (IGHERT) program which seeks to re-imagine how we train graduate students in the Humanities. IGHERT is supported by a major grant from the Mellon Foundation and the Consortium for Humanities Centers and Institutes which was awarded following an international competition. In January I will moderate a dialogue in downtown Santa Cruz on the theme of “Cosmos” with Professors Minghui Hu from the Department of History and Anthony Aguirre from the Department of Physics, which will literally seek to bring the university to the public.
Finally, in 2015, the UC-Santa Cruz will also be celebrating an important anniversary—its fiftieth. We are proud that the university has designated the IHR as one of its giving priorities in the capital campaign. And so, as we turn towards the future, we invite you to join us as we continue to ask questions that matter.
The IHR’s new annual report is now available online.
– Nathaniel Deutsch, IHR Director
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