Jean Allman, PhD, the J.H. Hexter Professor in the Humanities in Arts & Sciences and chair of the Department of History at Washington University in St. Louis, recently was named director of WUSTL’s Center for the Humanities.
Allman was selected to lead the center after an extensive internal search to fill the position. Gerald L. Early, PhD, founder and longtime Center for the Humanities director, stepped down last year to focus on a new interdisciplinary publication, The Common Reader.
Barbara A. Schaal, PhD, dean of the Faculty of Arts & Sciences and the Mary-Dell Chilton Distinguished Professor, announced Allman’s appointment.
“I know that she will develop new and exciting collaborations and initiatives at the center, and I am very happy that she is willing to take on this significant responsibility,” she said.
Allman, who also has appointments in the African and African-American Studies and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies programs, will continue as history chair until July 1, when Peter J. Kastor, PhD, professor of history and of American culture studies, assumes the position.
New associate director named
Allman recently announced that Rebecca A. Wanzo, PhD, associate professor of women, gender and sexuality studies, has joined the center as its new associate director.
She came to WUSTL in 2011 from the Ohio State University, where she was in the women’s studies and English departments. Her first book, “The Suffering Will Not Be Televised: African American Women and Sentimental Political Storytelling,” explores the cultural practices that make suffering legible or illegible in U.S. culture.
Wanzo is working on a book project titled “The Melancholic Patriot: African Americans, Citizenship, and Graphic Storytelling,” which looks at discourses of black citizenship in the comics medium.
Allman said Wanzo brings to the center scholarly and teaching expertise in feminist theory, African-American literature and culture, critical race theory, feminist media studies, graphic storytelling and cultural studies.
She is an active affiliate faculty member in American Culture Studies, co-directs the Law, Identity and Culture Initiative and serves as a co-chair of the Association of Women Faculty.
A member of the WUSTL faculty since 2007 and chair since 2009, Allman is regarded as one of the nation’s leading African historians and one of the pioneer Africanists in the field of gender. She has played a central role in the study of women and gender history in other disciplines as well.
Her research covers such topics as nation and national identity, gender and colonialism, fashion and the politics of clothing, and the modernity and mobility of indigenous belief systems.
Considered fair-minded, patient and a consensus builder, she has served on numerous university committees, including the Arts & Sciences Academic Planning Committee, Dean’s Committee on Research Leave and the Provost’s Committee on Target of Opportunity Hiring.
As Allman begins her new position, she shares some thoughts on the center’s ever-growing importance and role in highlighting the rich diversity of the humanities.
Fate of humanities at WUSTL tied to center’s health, vitality:
I believe that the issues facing the humanities today are perhaps only comparable in magnitude and complexity to those faced in the 1960s, as universities opened their doors and ushered in the largest expansion in higher education this country has ever witnessed. Yet these are days not of dramatic expansion, but of significant contraction, and we are often asked to do more and better with less.
Is this possible? How do we nurture the scholarly productivity and innovative research of humanities faculty, while training the faculty of tomorrow, and providing the very best foundational humanities education for a diverse undergraduate population?
How do we build and sustain a diverse and inclusive faculty and student body as part of our humanist mission? In what new kinds of ways can we build and nurture connections to our colleagues in the social sciences and sciences, as we affirm that a strong humanities core stands as the foundation of a liberal arts education?
In many ways, I believe that the fate of the humanities here is inextricably tied to the health and vitality of the center.
Growing on strength:
Gerald Early did an incredible job of building the center from the ground up. Thanks to his initiative and hard work, it now sits on a firm foundation, with strong public outreach to many communities and to humanities work across the country.
(Founded as the International Writers Center in 1990, the center, under Early’s leadership, changed its name in 2005 and expanded its mission to be more inclusive of other scholars and the larger community.)
Erin McGlothlin, who served as interim director, has consolidated the center’s growing focus on faculty and graduate student research and on interdisciplinary collaboration. She has been a strong advocate for us across the campus.
Plans for the center:
As we move forward in the coming years, I would like to develop:
- An expanded faculty fellow and graduate fellow program;
- A distinguished visitor program, which would work closely with campus-wide efforts to recruit underrepresented minority scholars to our faculty;
- A postdoctoral program housed in the center; and
- A “first book” initiative, aimed at facilitating the publication of first books by our tenure-track faculty.
I would also like to nurture the center’s global connections. Washington University now has more than 30 global partners through the McDonnell International Scholars Academy.
Many of those partners have thriving humanities programs, and it is important that humanities at Washington University be at the table as these partnerships develop.
Engaging the larger community:
In close consultation and collaboration with humanities chairs, directors and faculty, I hope to develop thematic clusters or constellations of expertise across the humanities disciplines.
We have already done some of this through the vertical seminar and the “modeling interdisciplinary inquiry” program. But I would like us to consider these constellations as sites not only for interdisciplinary research and teaching, but as places for rethinking graduate recruitment and training as well as faculty hiring.
The new initiative in the medical humanities is a wonderful example of the ways in which a cluster of interests might grow into a strategic plan for research, teaching, graduate recruitment and faculty hires.
I hope to build on the tremendous work of my predecessors in engaging institutions in our community: the Missouri History Museum, the Pulitzer (Foundation for the Arts), the Saint Louis Art Museum, the St. Louis Pubic Library and the Missouri Humanities Council, to name a few.