View the entire newsletter here.

LEAD ARTICLE:

Welcome from the new director

A note of introduction from the new director of the UR Humanities Center

Welcome and Welcome Back, a new school year begins! I am honored and excited to step into the role of Director of the University of Richmond Humanities Center. The Center promotes humanistic methodologies and facilitates humane conversations in the university’s intellectual and cultural life. Thanks to the efforts of my predecessor, the indefatigable Dr. Nathan Snaza, the UR Humanities Center is a welcoming space committed to fostering the essential role the humanities play across the university’s five schools, its departments, and its programs.

For those who don’t know me, I’m first and foremost a 25-year member of the History Department. I specialize in the Medieval and Renaissance history of the Mediterranean, southern Italy in particular. Over the years my research and teaching interests have ranged from twelfth-century aristocratic families to premodern travel and migration, and from the works of Dante to the Crusades. (If you’ve heard rumors of a professor who has their students plan sieges of campus buildings, yup, that’s me.)

A little over a decade ago, I co-developed the ‘Humanities Initiative’. The project had a twofold mission: first, to foster community and inquiry for students interested in humanistic study and second, to elevate the visibility of the humanities on campus – showcasing the work done by both faculty and students. The Humanities Fellows Program and Humanities Connect Program were born of these two objectives. Thanks in no small part to the foundational work of past Directors Nathan Snaza and, before him, Dr. Nicole Sackley, these two missions grew into the University-wide Center and its fruitful programming collaborations.  

Forging Ahead…

With many important pieces in place, the Humanities Center is moving into a new phase– one that comes during a challenging and, frankly, unprecedented time for universities and especially for the humanities. We are in a moment when ‘making the case’ to engage in this work has never been more urgent or necessary and at the same time has never been more difficult. Aware of these challenges, we seek to explain the centrality of humanities questions, values, and research as a way to promote understanding and to offer tools for navigating an often bewildering contemporary world.

For a new Director the theme for this year’s programming, How Do We Inherit? is specially fortuitous.  I will press forward with the goals that I have inherited and that have defined the Center since its inception:

1. To advocate for the Humanities
2. To nurture Students as Researchers and Ethical World Citizens
3. To facilitate Connections across Departments, Programs and Schools
4. To support Faculty Research and Pedagogy Through Collaboration  

I am eager to build upon the Center’s efforts to incorporate career planning and training into the program – to offer an ‘applied humanities’ of sorts by linking humanistic disciplines with career development for students. I will draw on the expertise of the newly - selected American Colleges of the South Mellon Academic Leadership Fellows, Dr. Mimi Hanaoka and Dr. Olivier Delers, whose charges include integrating the humanities with Career Services.  

We are fortunate to be part of an intellectual community of teacher-scholar-friends at UR.  We have a vibrant Humanities Center and an inviting dedicated space in the Humanities Commons.  We all know there are many humanities and humanities-adjacent events on campus – talks, workshops, exhibits – a veritable feast of opportunities to enjoy humane study and performances and to build community.   The Humanities Center will continue to operate as a clearinghouse for those events, where people inside and outside the university can find out what the humanities have on offer at UR.   

If you are planning an event that intersects in some way with the Humanities, please post on this Google doc. I urge you also to reach out to me with ideas and suggestions for future programming.  

I look forward to working with all of you over this next year.  And I am confident that as we exchange ideas, share new research possibilities and sing the praise of a humanities education we will continue to fulfill the Center’s vital mission:  to promote the humanities “as a cluster of practices that shape how we perceive, make sense of and respond to an ever-changing world.”   

 - Joanna…

View the entire newsletter here.

LEAD ESSAY:

I want to continue the practice of inviting scholars across campus and beyond to offer a brief piece about their latest work. For the September issue of the newsletter, I reached out to friend and colleague Dr. Sydney Watts from the Department of History. Sydney has put together a short essay on migration and the question: What moves us? I hope you enjoy her insights on this topic as much as I have.

Dr. Joanna Drell
Humanities Center Director

What moves us?

For the past several years, I have been pursuing the question: “What moves us?” I mean this literally – what propels us to quit the places we call home? As I study the lives of emigrants during the French Revolution, I keep coming back to the problem of those who are forced to leave, those who are free to cross borders, and those who are criminalized for their choices. Revolutionary prints portray the characteristic émigré as a wealthy aristocrat dashing away in a gilded carriage. Dressed in silk and lace, the courtier and his carefree entourage trip lightly across the frontier with trunks full of jewels and gold coins. Their departure was a “joyous” one – as the patriots shouted, “Good riddance!” From the perspective of noble emigrants who wrote about their experiences, the dissolution of Old Regime institutions and feudal systems of privilege was irrevocable. They fled a country that had turned against them. They abandoned their homes and sacrificed their patrimony. The Revolution had destroyed what was sacred to them: the monarchy, the Church, their birthright. Communities in exile soon became centers of counterrevolution. Emigrants, such as Chateaubriand, would later publish their memoirs as melancholy Romantics, lamenting all that was lost.  

Several summers ago, with the help of the Digital Scholarship Lab and a team of undergraduates, I mapped the ten-year migration of over eight hundred French people who sailed into the small fishing town of St. Helier on Jersey, one of the Channel Islands. As I pursued questions surrounding the origins of these registered “aliens,” I discovered how haphazard the emigration was for so many other French people. In addition to the flight of exiled bishops and members of defunct local parlements were the massive displacement of urban artisans, parish priests, harbor pilots, court musicians, skilled female and male workers, and hundreds of domestic servants. The small trickle of noble households in 1789-90 turned into a flood of commoners by 1792-93, overwhelming the local population of Jersey. Their arrivals came amidst foreign wars, popular insurrections, massive unemployment, and laws mandating deportation. The Channel Islands drew many emigrants who travelled alone to find work. Single mothers sought the safety of Jersey with infants and young children in tow. Couples married and raised families while separated during military missions. Roman Catholic clergy, forced into exile to avoid imprisonment in France, established parishes alongside Calvinist churches. Fear may have motivated them, but their migration schemes show the desire for continuity and stability.

What I have discovered in the archives has put a different face on the revolutionary emigration: the gendering of exiles, community coherence amidst the diaspora, and collective strategies that show safe-keeping and innovation in the face of threats. Writing about these experiences in the present anti-immigration climate with increased border control provides a much-needed perspective on this human experience. The circumstances in revolutionary France are, of course, entirely different from today. What remains constant is the human cost of regime change. The advantage of history is that we know how the story ends.

Sydney Watts

Associate Professor of History

View the entire newsletter here.

LEAD ESSAY:

The arts at Richmond are truly a treasure for our campus and the local community. At every turn our students are sharing their talents in an impressive recital, a thoughtful discussion on art acquisition, or fearlessly auditioning for main stage productions. Our faculty, too, delve deep into their disciplines, like my colleague Erling Sjovold who recently returned from an art fellowship in Paris, and who has co-taught the Humanities Fellows Program with me and Professor Nicole Maurantonio. That leads us to Issa Lampe and Orianna Cacchione of our University Museums who bring us this month’s lead essays in photos — with strong connections to our inheritance theme. If you haven’t been to the Harnett Museum of Art this semester or the recently re-opened Lora Robins Gallery, you’re missing the fine work of the entire Museums team.

 - Joanna

Harnett Museum Collection Spotlight

The Dixie of Our Union

Issa Lampe, executive director of University Museums, has curated a spotlight exhibition of a single work of art (ten framed drawings) by Bethany Collins called “The Dixie of Our Union.”  In the ten framed pages, Collins graphically recreates—by copying and hand-drawing—historical sheet music for eight pro- Union “Dixie” contrafacta (alternative lyrics to a familiar melody) from the early 1860s. In her transcription of Dixie’s Land no. 5, Collins has written and then expunged a racist slur, leaving a smudge of graphite: “…old Virginie’s strapping [*******] make good…diggers.” Spraying pigment at her pages like an activist in the historical archive, she evokes both past and present violence. The artist has described these inky clouds as representations of the tear gas used on protesters in Minnesota after the 2020 killing of George Floyd, noting in an interview, “Dixie becomes the thread that connects all of our past to now—2020 didn’t come out of nowhere.” This piece, now a part of UR’s permanent collection, exemplifies a cultural artifact that that can be linked to the current Humanities Center theme of ‘inheritance’.

CURRENTLY ON VIEW

Cauleen Smith: Dusk of Dawn

Cauleen Smith: Dusk of Dawn is organized by the University of Richmond Museums in collaboration with the Department of Art & Art History as part of the 2025-26 Tucker Boatwright Festival of Literature and the Arts. In this exhibition, Smith directs her focus on reimagining the unfulfilled promise of Reconstruction after the Civil War.  Smith references monuments through two different registers—empty plinths and executive orders—to critically reconsider how we, as a country, commemorate our history. The exhibition uses both immersive video installation, and a related set of drawings to shift the focus of Reconstruction from the rebuilding of the former Confederate states to the indispensable contributions African Americans made to the reformation of American culture and politics.  

The title of the exhibition is borrowed from W.E.B. DuBois’s 1940 autobiography, Dusk of Dawn in which he grapples with the construction of race and the psycho-political condition of African Americans, ultimately demanding a refusal of internalized racist logics. Positing Richmond as a nexus of the American psyche, this exhibition reflects on the ghosts of the Confederacy that continue to haunt contemporary society and asks what a more perfect union might look like.  

The exhibition is curated by Orianna Cacchione, Deputy Director and Curator of Exhibitions.

Images courtesy of the Harnett Museum of Art, University of Richmond Museums.
Photography by Meg Eastman. Artwork © Cauleen Smith.