Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story has been corrected to reflect an event cancellation.
The University of Georgia will present its third annual Humanities Festival from March 11 to April 2, featuring more than 20 public lectures, conversations, performances and other events, including a trivia night and an open reception to honor recent accomplishments by the humanities community at UGA.
Among the highlights are a National Book Award winner, a sitar player with 11 Grammy nominations, the 2024 Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize-winning author and one of two classical musicians in the Georgia Music Hall of Fame.
“Our mission is to share the joy of writing, reading, thinking and making, which are the foundations of all human concern,” said Nicholas Allen, Baldwin Professor in Humanities, director of the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts and co-chair of the UGA Humanities Council. “The imagination is the engine of all innovation, and the University of Georgia is a machine for ideas that shape our state and nation’s futures. The Humanities Festival is a great opportunity to see a snapshot of the brilliant work that goes on across the campus all year, from the classroom to the world.”
The festival is organized by the Humanities Council, created in 2022 to elevate humanities research and practice at UGA and to bring visibility to the humanities as part of campus culture. The council is supported by the Office of Research, the Office of the Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost and the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, with the participation of more than 30 colleges, schools, departments and units across the university.
The Humanities Festival Student and Faculty Appreciation Reception begins at 5:30 p.m. on March 17 in the Founders Memorial Garden. The following evening offers another opportunity for company and conversation with Humanities Trivia Night at Ciné. Anyone is invited to form a team in advance or on the spot.
The world-renowned sitarist Anoushka Shankar will perform at Hodgson Concert Hall on March 20 as part of the UGA Performing Arts Center’s Voices of Asia spring series. The series also brings revered pianist and conductor Mitsuko Uchida with Berlin’s Mahler Chamber Orchestra on March 25.
Robert Spano, music director of the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra and Music Director Laureate of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, will be in residence at UGA and Atlanta from March 21-24 as the Willson Center’s Delta Visiting Chair for Global Understanding, presented in partnership with the Hugh Hodgson School of Music. He will give a workshop for UGA student composers with the ASO and two public talks including a presentation on the Atlanta School of Composers in the Hodgson School’s Edge Recital Hall.
Charles Johnson, MacArthur “genius” grant awardee and National Book Award-winning author of “Middle Passage,” will give a public reading and conversation on March 26 as the annual Betty Jean Craige Lecturer of the department of comparative literature and intercultural studies. On March 27, Ferdia Lennon, winner of the 2024 Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize and the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize for comic fiction, will also have a reading and conversation. The event is part of UGA’s spring Signature Lecture Series.
Other festival events will feature UGA faculty members including a book launch by Diana Graizbord, assistant professor of sociology and Latin American and Caribbean studies; a gallery talk in the Georgia Museum of Art by Paola De Santo, associate professor of Italian; and a conversation and screening of Mai Zetterling’s 1968 modernist cinema masterpiece “The Girls” with Anna Stenport, professor of communication studies with an appointment in the Institute of Women’s and Gender Studies and dean of the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences.
The festival will close on April 2 with the 2025 Odum Environmental Ethics Lecture by ethnographer, writer, photographer and filmmaker Wade Davis on his 2009 book, “The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World.”
“Research and scholarship, teaching and practice in the humanities are essential to advance our understanding of ourselves and the world,” said S. Jack Hu, senior vice president for academic affairs and provost. “Through their world-class scholarship in the humanities, UGA’s faculty, staff and students provide deeply informed perspectives that impact all areas of human learning and endeavor. This festival is an opportunity for us to celebrate the people who produce this outstanding work and to share it with our whole community.”
The full schedule of the 2025 UGA Humanities Festival is available here.
Participating units in the Humanities Festival include the UGA Humanities Council; Office of the Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost; Office of Research; Franklin College of Arts and Sciences; Jere W. Morehead Honors College; College of Environment and Design; departments of classics, communication studies, comparative literature and intercultural studies, English, Germanic and Slavic studies, history, philosophy, religion, Romance languages, sociology, and theatre and film studies; Hugh Hodgson School of Music; Lamar Dodd School of Art; Odum School of Ecology; Willson Center for Humanities and Arts; Center for Asian Studies; Center for Undergraduate Research Opportunities; African Studies Institute; Institute for African American Studies; Institute for Women’s and Gender Studies; Institute of Native American Studies; Latin American and Caribbean Studies Institute; Creative Writing Program; Environmental Ethics Certificate Program; Music Business Program; UGA Libraries; Georgia Museum of Art; and The Georgia Review.
