Helping Faculty Flourish

February 20, 2023

Faculty Fellows gather and discuss their research weekly in Hyde Hall, the home of the Institute for the Arts and Humanities.

During the Campaign for Carolina, the Institute for the Arts and Humanities (IAH) raised more than $8.8 million to support 23 faculty fellowship funds (both new and previously established funds).

No program of the institute embodies its mission of empowering faculty to achieve their full potential more than the Faculty Fellows Program. The program provides on-campus, semester-long fellowship funding and programming for faculty from the College of Arts and Sciences to pursue arts and humanities-related research and creative work that leads to publication, exhibition, composition and performance. By providing faculty with focused time off from teaching, they are able to make valuable connections with other fellows and advance their work in meaningful ways.

Highly valued by faculty members, these fellowships help address the larger challenge of faculty recruitment and retention in the College of Arts and Sciences. In fact, more than 80 percent of institute fellows who have received outside offers have chosen to stay at the University. The impact of philanthropic funding on retaining outstanding faculty at Carolina made fundraising for faculty fellowships the institute’s top priority during the campaign.

“The fellowship itself was a stimulating and rewarding experience,” said Shayne Legassie, an associate professor of English and comparative literature who was an IAH Faculty Fellow in spring 2022. “In addition to giving me the opportunity to meet and exchange ideas with UNC scholars that I had never met before, I also had the pleasure of reading their works-in-progress. It is rare to have the chance to get out of one’s departmental and disciplinary bubble to have prolonged, meaningful conversations about cutting-edge work in other fields of study. My area of expertise is comparative literature, and I found it uniquely eye opening to share my own early research with scholars in history, folklore, religious studies, communication, Romance studies and English literature. Our weekly meetings — organized with the greatest possible thought and care by the IAH — were the highlight of the semester and one of the most intellectually significant experiences of my career.”