Sara Guyer, former Director of the UW-Madison Center for the Humanities (CfH) and Dorothy Draheim Professor of English and Jewish Studies, will depart UW-Madison to become dean of Arts and Humanities at the University of California-Berkeley. Guyer’s new appointment was announced by UC-Berkeley on April 15.
A scholar of British and continental romanticism, critical theory and holocaust studies, Guyer led CfH from 2008 until 2019, building upon the Center’s emerging strengths in public programming and cross-disciplinary workshops for faculty and students. Under her leadership, the Great World Texts program reached thousands of students and teachers in dozens of school districts throughout the state of Wisconsin. A champion of the public humanities—collaborations between scholars and the community—Guyer helped secure funding for multiyear projects, including the Public Humanities Exchange and the Public Humanities Fellowship program, generously supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Cross-disciplinary opportunities, such as the Borghesi-Mellon Workshops, drew students and faculty from across the university to work together outside of the classroom on interdisciplinary topics.
With her flair for planning intellectual programming that was anything but dry, Guyer energized the public lecture series, Humanities Without Boundaries. On her watch, attendance grew exponentially, with campus and community members alike flocking to free lectures featuring internationally-known scholars, playwrights, novelists, historians, poets, filmmakers, critics and more. Guyer also showcased the ideas and work of UW-Madison’s own humanities faculty through another public lecture series, Focus on the Humanities. Guyer’s insistence that “complex ideas matter” focused the mission of the Center on sharing rigorous scholarly and creative work with audiences beyond the academy.
“Through her pioneering work in the public humanities, Sara Guyer has helped to realize the Wisconsin Idea by connecting the best of our campus to the state,” says Russ Castronovo, Tom Paine Professor of English, Dorothy Draheim Professor of American Studies and current Director of CfH. “Her leadership has been transformative, as her success in winning major grants, talent for creative programming, advocacy for the public humanities, and backing of innovative initiatives has placed UW-Madison at the center of a global conversation about the future of the humanities.”
In 2016, in addition to her role as director of CfH, Guyer assumed the presidency of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes, founded in 1988 to link humanities organizations and scholars. With her selection, CHCI moved its administrative home to UW-Madison, from its previous home at the Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University.
“Sara Guyer fostered partnerships with colleagues across disciplines, including in the STEMM fields and in the Wisconsin School of Business. Her collaborative approach encouraged creativity, innovation and discussion among faculty and students alike,” says College of Letters & Science Dean Eric Wilcots.