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IAH News • Summer 2008
From the Director’s Desk: The State of the Institute

It’s been just about two years since I assumed the position of Director of the Institute for the Arts and Humanities. So it is time to take stock. What have we accomplished at the IAH over the past twenty-four months and what are our hopes and dreams going forward?

The last two years have been largely devoted to:

  • Making the IAH a vibrant intellectual cross-roads, especially for faculty in the arts and humanities, by greatly expanding the number of events—lectures, workshops, informal discussions, performances, receptions—that bring faculty, students, and the general public into Hyde Hall.

  • Attending to our core programs—the Faculty Fellowship Program and the Academic Leadership Program—to insure that both are creating the kind of collegial relationships and productive collaborative interactions that make UNC a great place to be a member of the faculty.

  • Creating a new program for recently appointed chairs of departments in the College of Arts and Sciences in order to enhance their chances of success in that key role.

  • Bringing on-line two new initiatives—the Kenan Faculty Retention Fund and the Chairs “Say Yes” Program—that assist the College of Arts and Sciences in its efforts to retain our best faculty.

  • Developing a Grants Mentorship Program to assist faculty in the arts and humanities in their search for external funding to support their research.

  • Continuing the tradition of having the IAH, as a collegial faculty center, serve as a “think tank,” as a place for conversations among faculty, administrators, supporters, and friends of the university about issues crucial to the future of UNC.

  • Clarifying the Institute’s financial position and creating a long-range financial plan that connects our needs and aspirations to our development activities.

  • Establishing a communications infrastructure, including a new look and tag line, a new web-site, a regular newsletter, and an array of development materials.

  • Making necessary staff adjustments and changes—especially the hiring of an Executive Director and an Assistant Director of Development—to increase the IAH’s productivity and efficiency.

  • Established the George H. Johnson Prize for Distinguished Achievement by an IAH Fellow. The first winner will be announced at the beginning of the academic year 2008–2009, and the Prize will be awarded once every two years.
What comes next? We have some ambitious plans for the next two years.

The Institute will continue to do all the things just listed above. But we also have several new initiatives that we think respond to needs on campus and to the changing environment on American university campuses.

  • Initiate, in collaboration with College of Arts and Sciences, a Program for New Faculty that serves to assimilate these new hires more quickly into campus life and helps them negotiate the early stages of a career in academia.

  • Create a Program for Collaborative Practices that initiates and supports faculty working groups on a variety of topics and with a variety of goals. Such groups can be pursuing traditional research topics, curricular innovations, various forms of engaged scholarship, or questions of institutional import. The IAH will provide space and some financial and staff support for such groups, while also aiding their search for other sources of funding, especially external grants.

  • Within the framework of the Program for Collaborative Practice, work with the Renaissance Computing Initiative (RENCI), the University Libraries, Carolina Performing Arts, the Ackland Art Museum, Information Technology Services, the fine arts departments in the College, and other units on campus to assist faculty in developing projects that attend to developments in digital humanities and in the use of new technologies in the various arts. The goal is to make Carolina one of the five top places in this country for faculty in the arts and humanities who are using the new technologies to change the ways the arts and humanities produce knowledge and communicate that knowledge to students, fellow faculty, and the public. Our first big project will be a Digital Arts and Humanities Festival during the 2009–2010 academic year.

    • Sincerely-

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    John McGowan
    The Ruel W. Tyson Jr. Distinguished Professor of Humanities
    Director, Institute for the Arts and Humanities

    		 
     
    Profiled Fellow: Joyce Rudinsky
    Joyce Rudinsky
    Joyce Rudinsky     		Some artists imagine a throng of adoring patrons standing awestruck before their masterwork. Communications Studies professor Joyce Rudinsky would be disappointed with this reaction to her latest media installation, “Spectacular Justice.” For one thing, Rudinsky does not expect her patrons to stand still. She does not see her work as a static creation, nor does she consider it a singular enterprise. “Spectacular Justice” is a collaborative work in the extreme, designed by a team of artists and programmers, and then recreated by each person who visits it. Midway through this project, Rudinsky “joined the conversation” as an IAH Fellow and found yet another opportunity to gather collaborators. Read more...
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    IAH in Action
    New Fellowships in the Arts
     The Institute for the Arts and Humanities is pleased to announce that, thanks to funding from the Office of the Executive Director for the Arts, two new faculty fellowships in the arts will be awarded for the 2009–2010 academic year.

    The Faculty Arts Fellows Program will award up to two fellowships each year to advance creative endeavors and/or scholarly research that incorporate the arts in a tangible way. The Fellowship will be open to all tenure-track faculty at UNC and to fixed-term faculty who have been at Carolina for at least five years.     Read more...
    Board of Trustees Dinner
     The March 26 dinner provided an opportunity for the Trustees and UNC administrators to discuss with faculty how to manage growth in ways that do not undermine Carolina’s current strengths. While there has been no mandate from either the legislature or the Board of Governors for UNC-Chapel Hill to take more students, the growing population of 18 year olds in the state creates an indirect pressure to which the university has been, and will continue to, respond. At this point, no target number has been set, even as enrollment has steadily increased. Almost everyone agreed that deciding on a specific number would be a good strategy and enhance the ability to manage growth. “Creeping growth,” as one faculty member put it, is much worse than planned growth because the additional burdens sneak up on us. Read more...
    IAH Launches Digital Arts and Humanities Program
     The aim of all this effort is to inspire, support, and encourage faculty who are involved in artistic creation, humanities research, teaching, and service that use and demonstrate the potential of these new technologies.
    —Megan Granda, Ph.D., IAH Executive Director

    Between November 2007 and April 2008, the IAH involved more than one hundred faculty and staff members in a series of meetings and demonstration sessions across the campus on topics in digital arts and humanities.

    Communication Studies Associate Professor Joyce Rudinsky, who was part of the core planning group, said, “For the first time we had people all over campus sharing their visions about how we could work together to move the arts and humanities forward in the digital age. It was a very exciting series of meetings.” Read more...

    Joyce Rudinsky's media
    installation “Spectacular Justice”
    Ice Tunnel

    penguin
    		 Two Symphonies: Brooks de Wetter-Smith and Allen Anderson on ICEBLINK
    IAH Fellows Allen Anderson and Brooks de Wetter-Smith performed the original sight and sound composition ICEBLINK to a full theater at the NC Museum of Natural Science on April 27.

    ICEBLINK is a multi-media arts performance based on the photography of UNC music Professor de Wetter-Smith who journeyed to the Antarctic Peninsula in December 2006. He traveled aboard the National Geographic Ship Endeavor which braved forty foot waves and 70 mile per hour gales in navigating the Drake Passage. De Wetter-Smith, an award winning flutist and accomplished photographer, who is also the James Gordon Hanes Distinguished Professor in the Humanities, took hundreds of pictures in this beautiful, remote, other worldly locale inhabited only by “seals, penguins, whales and other ocean life.”

    According to the program notes, “ICEBLINK…is a meditation on Antarctica—the color, the expanse and shape, the time and change of and the life. It is about what is real and imagined. It is about the unfamiliar and the extreme. It is about Antarctica as a real place and as an interior space, the psychological edge of the world.” Read more...
    Read the latest IAH News at www.iah.unc.edu/news
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    PERSPECTIVES
    Smart Growth: How can Carolina expand without undermining quality?
    One pressing issue faces the College of Arts and Sciences and the University. It touches a lot of bases, but it’s really one issue—growth. Over the next five to ten years, the state of North Carolina will grow significantly, and we’re going to be asked to expand what we do.

    The University currently stands at about 28,500 undergraduate and graduate students. Projections are that those numbers could increase to between 33,000 to 35,000. Just imagine an additional 7,000 students on campus and the impact that will have on everything from dorm rooms to classrooms to faculty and advising. There isn’t any part of the University that won’t be touched.

    Where do we cap the growth? That is part of the debate. I think the key metric to keep in mind is delivering a quality education that we’re proud of and that fulfills our mission to the state. If there comes a point at which we feel we are undermining the quality of the education that we deliver, then that should be a concern to everyone in the state. UNC-Chapel Hill provides a tremendous amount of intellectual capital that then turns into economic development—jobs created and businesses attracted. If we allow the University to falter, then those jobs and growth will decline as well. Read more...     		Holden Thorp
    Nelson Schwab III, Chair, UNC-Chapel Hill Chancellor Search Committee and member of the University’s Board of Trustees

    Copyright © 2008 Institute for the Arts and Humanities, College of Arts and Sciences
    The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
    Campus Box 3322 • Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3322 • phone 919.962.0249 • iah@unc.edu

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