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Humanities Center Leadership Boot Camp

November 1–3, 2024 at the National Humanities Center

Overview Sessions Speakers

Campus-based humanities centers and humanities-focused institutes play a vital role for faculty members, students, and campus communities. But what do they need to succeed? For that matter, how do humanities centers define “success”? And how do successful administrators ensure their centers flourish?

The National Humanities Center will host new humanities center leaders from our institutional sponsors for a three-day workshop addressing the administrative, fundraising, and operational challenges with which humanities administrators must contend. Sessions will focus on interactive learning and networking and feature leaders from humanities centers across the country.

Program Overview

This three-day, in-person boot camp will explore best practices for running a humanities center. Participants will review grant writing skills and donor management, make strategic plans, and discuss innovative ideas in the role of the humanities center on university campuses. Participants will have opportunities to work with each other through interactive sessions and projects.

Program Goals

Speakers and Session Topics

Mapping out the Future of Humanities Centers

Nicholas Allen, PhD (Director, Willson Center for Humanities and Arts, University of Georgia)
Building humanities communities is a complex work of collaboration, and nurturing a thriving humanities center is a collective enterprise. The contexts of that enterprise are individual, social, intellectual, and institutional. The aspirations are contextual, contemporary, and various. This session will help you identify and map some strategies to build capacity, networks, and partnerships that can help your center evolve towards local, national, and international engagement, with some reflection on how to think about the future of your center in its day-to-day practice.

Implementing Your Vision: Strategic Planning for Humanities Centers

Ulka Anjaria, PhD (Director, Mandel Center for the Humanities, Brandeis University)
This session will provide you with tools for determining a vision as a new director, gaining buy-in from your community, and implementing that vision in the short- and long-term.

Going Public: Creating Community Connections and (Really) Engaging a Non-Academic Audience

Carin Berkowitz, PhD (Executive Director, New Jersey Council for the Humanities)
Connections between academia and broader audiences are more important than ever amidst cultures of distrust of expertise and rhetoric about the decline of the humanities. This session will allow you to think about how to forge such connections by clearly conceptualizing who your audiences are, where and how to find those audience members, and what content and methods might engage them. You will then experiment with those program-building skills by working in groups to build hypothetical public programs using the North Carolina Museum of Art’s exhibitions to think through how to put ideas into practice.

Fundraising CPR: Creating an Ecosystem for Attractive Alliances

Danielle Blackwell, MPA, CFRE, CFRM (Associate Vice Chancellor, Institutional Advancement, North Carolina Central University)
Strategic partnerships afford organizations the opportunity to reach a broad spectrum of communities and resources. Much like the laws of attraction, securing grant funding hinges on relationships, self-awareness, shared goals, alignment, and community. Convenings and participatory research work to create attractive alliances for public and private grant makers. Through this session, you will come to understand fundraising as a unit of identity, gain insight into capacity building among partners, and learn ways to facilitate collaborative and equitable partnerships in all phases of the funding cultivation process.

Operational Visions and Institutional Challenges

Barbara Mennel, PhD (Former Director of the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere, University of Florida)
This session addresses internal processes in the context of diverse institutional contexts. We will explore ways that humanities centers can function efficiently in diverse administrative frameworks.

Avoiding Administrative Obsession to Sustain a Personal Life and a Research Agenda

Robert D. Newman, PhD (Former President and Director, National Humanities Center)
Now that you’ve assumed an administrative position, some of your colleagues will jokingly (or not) brand you as having “entered the dark side.” Responsible administrators often discover they’ve succumbed to disproportionate allocations of their work and personal time in order to accomplish their goals. During this session, we will discuss some ideas regarding how best to sustain a research agenda, preserve personal time, and avoid unhealthy administrative obsessions.

The Value of the Humanities to a Research University

Vincent Price, PhD (President, Duke University)
Keynote Dinner Address

Registration

The cost for the workshop is $2,900 and includes hotel lodging and all meals. Participants must cover their own transportation. Space is limited to 30 seats, so we encourage interested administrators to register early.