Russ Castronovo has been named the new director of the UW-Madison Center for the Humanities, effective August 1, 2019. Castronovo, who chaired the English department for three years as the Tom Paine Professor of English and Dorothy Draheim Professor of American Studies, will build upon the Center’s strengths and focus on new ways to engage students, according to L&S Associate Dean for Arts & Humanities Susan Zaeske.
“Russ brings broad knowledge of the humanities, an appreciation of interdisciplinary work and deep scholarship in a number of humanities disciplines,” says Zaeske. “He will extend our already impressive accomplishments in the public humanities realm. And as a stellar, award-winning teacher, I know he will develop innovative ways to engage our undergraduate and graduate students in the humanities.”
Since 2009, the Center for the Humanities has served as a hub for many cross-disciplinary and collaborative initiatives across the spectrum of the humanities. Former director Sara Guyer (now serving as president of the international body known as the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes) established a strong focus on the “public humanities,” believing that people outside the university care deeply about the questions that humanities scholars are asking. Under her leadership, the Center attracted millions in funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, as well as other donors, for programs that offer ways for scholars and the general public to come together through reading, ideas and discussion.
Through Humanities Without Boundaries, an annual lecture series, the Center has enlivened Madison’s cultural scene with evenings featuring writer Jill Lepore, playwright Mary Zimmerman, linguist John McWhorter, public intellectual Henry Louis Gates, chef and food activist Alice Waters and hundreds more of the world’s most exciting thinkers and creators. Humanities Now, a panel series organized around breaking news and world events, brings scholars and the public together to discuss everything from the opioid crisis to the Occupy movement and dozens of other timely topics.
In addition, the Center supports academic research through interdisciplinary workshops and seminars, the First Book program and the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship program. Thanks to these opportunities, faculty, graduate students and undergraduates find multiple ways to connect, develop new ideas and further their academic careers. Besides supporting academic endeavors, the Center champions the unique benefits of humanities-based inquiry and training in settings outside academia. Through a multi-year project funded by the A.W. Mellon Foundation, Engaging the Humanities, the Center offers public humanities fellowships that place PhDs in partner institutions around Madison, including museums, hospitals, community centers and emerging businesses.
Around the state of Wisconsin, the Center for the Humanities is best-known for its Great World Texts program, which has brought thousands of Wisconsin high school students, as well as their teachers, into a collaborative exchange with UW-Madison humanities faculty and graduate students for a year-long close reading of a classic work of literature.
Castronovo says the Center has been “a true public resource for Wisconsin.”
“The Center’s programs take humanities research and teaching beyond campus, helping to fulfill the mission of a public university,” he says. “I am humbled and honored to be advancing the Wisconsin Idea through the work of the Center for the Humanities.”
As a writer and scholar, Castronovo explores a range of subjects across the humanities, including aesthetics, propaganda, citizenship and death. He embraces interdisciplinarity, seeking ways to bridge literature with history, visual culture, philosophy and political theory. He is known for his engaging approach to teaching. In 2016, he was honored with a Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award and in 2017 he received UW-System’s James R. Underkofler Award for excellence in teaching.
Castronovo appeared on a Humanities Now panel, sponsored by the Center for the Humanities, dealing with the events in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017.
“The humanities, I believe, are instrumental to helping us understand the full dimension of the crises we confront today, whether it is climate change, increasing political polarization, the erosion of democratic norms or racial injustice,” he says.