Support the Center
So that we may better serve both the university community and the greater community, we seek to build a permanent endowment for the Humanities Center. This endowment will make it possible to expand and enrich programming that emphasizes the role of the humanities in civic engagement and cultural literacy.
Thank you for your interest in supporting the Center for the Humanities & the Public Sphere. For information regarding common types of gifts, incentives for giving, and methods of giving to the Center, please contact:
Cynthia Butler
Senior Director of Development
College of Liberal Arts & Sciences
Voice: (352) 846-3447
Email: cbutler@uff.ufl.edu
Endowment funds have supported a wide range of programs and activities:
Past Programs – Brief History
The Council began sponsoring in Spring 2001 a term lecture by a prominent scholar. The selected scholar will be in residence approximately two weeks and give two to three public lectures and other seminars. The lectures can be presented and archived on the web as well as published. The inaugural Term Lecturer in spring 2001 was Jacques Derrida, followed by Jerry Fodor, and Elaine Pagels.Each year the Council sponsored a number of lectures and readings at the behest of the various humanities departments on topics of interest to the respective departments.
During the critical early stages of the center’s formation, a series of four lectures by leading humanists on the state and future of the humanities complemented the more focused activities of the planning committee for the center. One of the missions of the planning committee was to outline, not only institutionally but also intellectually, the scope and purpose of the Center. Given the intellectual ferment within the humanities during the recent past, neither their present condition nor their future can be easily discerned or predicted. By bringing prominent humanists to campus, we can stimulate a broad conversation about the mission of the humanities and in turn define more precisely the charge of the proposed humanities center. The scholars who would be invited to campus would be recognized both as leaders in their respective fields as well as original thinkers about the broader mission of the humanities. John D’Arms (a classicist, former Dean of the Graduate School at the University of Michigan, and currently the President of the American Council of Learned Societies) was the first of the speakers, Robert Connor, then Director of the National Humanities Center, was the second, and Sander Gilman, newly appointed head of the Humanities Lab at the University of Illinois-Chicago and now at Emory University was the third (September 2001). John Guillory from NYU was the fourth. In addition, these speakers and Keith Baker, then Director of the Stanford University Humanities Center, were brought in as consultants regarding the structures and work of the nascent center.
In 2001-2002, a key stage in establishing a humanities center was an experimental seminar for implementation of the Humanities Center. In order to begin the collaborative process, the planning committee (Shelly Isenberg, Robert D’Amico, Fitz Brundage, and John Leavey) expanded its work into a seminar designed as a small experiment in the very structures and research that a humanities center would support. The seminar took on the task of researching and planning the first several years of the Humanities Center.
The seminar consisted of the planning committee, five interested faculty (each on one-course release time for the academic year), and four interested graduate students (appointed as graduate research associates for the academic year). The seminar met 15 times within the academic year and will served as the fundamental resource for the task force.
An extensive program of collaborative activities (seminars, symposia, research groups, lecture series, and such) has been funded by the College, by Research and Graduate Programs, and the humanities departments. For information about previously supported conferences, symposia, and distinguished speakers, please click here.
