The University of Georgia will present its fourth annual Humanities Festival from March 16 to April 2. The three-week festival will feature public lectures, conversations, readings and other events including an opening celebration honoring recent accomplishments by the humanities community at UGA.
Highlights include a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and historian, the Odum Environmental Ethics Lecture on a photographic odyssey through the Okefenokee Swamp and a student-led FanZine Frenzy.
“The Humanities Festival combines celebration, recognition and innovation,” said Nicholas Allen, Baldwin Professor in Humanities, director of the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts and co-chair of the UGA Humanities Council. “It has grown into a key spring event in Athens, blossoming with ideas and energy. There is something for everyone here, in books, conversations, performances and making, and I’m excited to see what our community comes up with this year.”
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 40 colleges, schools, departments and units across the university.
The Humanities Festival opening celebration on March 17 will highlight significant achievements by students and faculty in the humanities and the arts during the past year. The event, which is open to the public, begins at 5:30 p.m. in the Founders Memorial Garden and will include remarks from students O-Jeremiah Agbaakin and Finn Walsh. Agbaakin is a doctoral student in the department of English and the Creative Writing Program and a recent recipient of the Georgia Writers Association’s John Lewis Writing Grant in poetry, while Walsh is a senior Honors student and UGA’s latest Marshall Scholar.
“As someone interested in medicine and infectious disease, I’ve found the humanities component of my education here at UGA to be essential to my academic development,” said Walsh, who will graduate this spring with a bachelor’s degree in genetics and a minor in Spanish.
DIY Dawgs: A FanZine Frenzy, sponsored by the department of English and the Willson Center on March 16, will provide attendees with an opportunity to learn about the history of fanzines, browse hundreds of fanzines on display or make one for themselves. Workshops and activities, supplies, snacks and encouragement will be provided.
The evening of March 18 offers another opportunity for company and conversation — as well as an added touch of competition — with Humanities Trivia Night at Ciné. Anyone is invited to form a team in advance or on the spot.
Atlanta-based photographer David Walter Banks, whose book “Trembling Earth: A Transcendental Trip Through the Okefenokee” was published by The Bitter Southerner in 2025, will give the Odum Environmental Ethics Lecture on March 25. For “Trembling Earth,” Banks paddled 500 miles and spent 69 nights over three years in the Okefenokee Swamp to create a fantastical, personal essay in 90 photographs that communicate his dreamlike vision of the Okefenokee’s unique, awe-inspiring and precarious ecosystem.
On March 27, author and journalist Rick Atkinson will give the Ferdinand Phinizy Lecture, which is part of the university’s spring 2026 Signature Lecture Series. Atkinson is one of the nation’s foremost public historians and the author of eight narrative histories about five American wars. “The Fate of the Day,” the second book in his planned trilogy on the American Revolution, debuted in 2025 as the No. 1 New York Times nonfiction bestseller and was lavishly praised by critics and peers. Atkinson won the Pulitzer Prize for History for his 2007 book “An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942-1943.”
Other festival events include a talk by Jan Brandt, the department of Germanic and Slavic studies’ 2026 Max Cade Writer in Residence; a discussion of Choctaw Star Stories with Choctaw Nation Citizen Kat Gardner-Vandy of Oklahoma State University; a series of Willis Center for Writing conversations on humanities and artificial intelligence; and a panel discussion with UGA English alumni working in publishing.
The festival will close on April 2 with a talk by underwater archaeologist Ashley Lemke, presented by the Georgia Museum of Natural History, and a reading and conversation with writers Tarfia Faizullah and author Jamel Brinkley organized by The Georgia Review and the Institute for African American Studies.
“The humanities enrich our students’ academic programs and inform the mission of higher education,” said Elizabeth Weeks, interim vice provost for academic affairs, associate provost for faculty affairs and co-chair of the Humanities Council. “UGA’s annual spring Humanities Festival complements our annual fall Spotlight on the Arts festival, celebrating disciplines focused on human expression and thought.”
See the full 2026 Humanities Festival schedule at https://willson.uga.edu/public-humanities/uga-humanities-council/2026-uga-humanities-festival/.