Monday, October 20, 2025, 11:30 AM – 1 PM EDT
Carla Freeman, Director of the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry and Goodrich C. White Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Emory
“Fox Center – New Directions”
With higher education facing potentially transformational change, there has never been a better time to intensify recognition of the humanities and their important role in scholarly and public life. For the last two years Emory’s Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry, which celebrates its 25th anniversary this fall, has been engaged in not only “amplifying the crucial importance of humanistic inquiry and scholarship” but also giving Emory students, faculty, and community members new opportunities to coalesce around common themes and together explore imaginative questions, such as, “What does it mean to study democracy?”
In 2025-2026, Fox Center students and faculty are engaging in a yearlong exploration of “Life/Story,” following last year’s examination of Democracy: Past, Present, and Future, to ask questions such as, “How do biography, oral history, and ethnography unearth particular renderings of a life? How does a single life story shed light upon central themes of the human condition?” The focus of Fox Center Fellows’s research (from undergraduate honors students through tenured professors across diverse humanistic fields) includes individual subjects both “renowned and obscure.” What will tie these studies together is a collective examination of how a single life can provide an illuminating “entry point for understanding broad political, socio-cultural, and historical phenomena.”
The Fox Center’s annual thematic approach is part of a new direction inspired by Dr. Carla Freeman who has been Fox Center Director since 2023. Building upon the Fox Center’s solid foundations, “we are expanding the scope of our mission: providing occasions for lively intellectual community, bold interdisciplinary and collaborative inquiry, broad public engagement and programming, as well as the time and space for quiet, immersive scholarship and writing.” For her upcoming talk to the Emeritus College, Dr. Freeman will describe the genesis of the Center’s new directions and how the Fox Center promises to further recognition of the humanities at Emory and beyond.