The Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry (FCHI) is the focal point for humanities endeavors at Emory University and serves to advance research, teaching, public engagement, and programming across all humanistic fields.

A Welcome from the Director

As the new director of the Fox Center, I am thrilled to be supporting an institution devoted to making connections between people and ideas, between past and present, and between the university and the community. Here are some of the things we do at the Center:

Each year, we bring together a group of faculty members, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students to work intensively on big projects (typically books and dissertations); they share their work in progress, trade ideas, and discuss central issues in the humanities. We provide mentorship and interdisciplinary community for talented undergraduates working on humanistic Honors theses. We help authors find new audiences through our digital publishing initiative, our book launches, and our podcasts. We host and support interdisciplinary groups of scholars at Emory who are planning conferences or publications, undertaking new areas of research, developing curricular initiatives, and other big scholarly ventures. We bring to campus scholars, writers, and performers who can stimulate conversation about culture, society, and history for a wide range of students, faculty, and friends from the Atlanta community. We sponsor seminars on big ideas that are open to the public.

We are also developing some exciting new programs at the Center. An initiative in “experiential humanities” will forge partnerships between the university and local cultural and civic organizations to provide opportunities for students and faculty to engage in research in the public interest. And the “Asking the Big Questions” program is creating teams of faculty to design core courses for undergraduate students based on the proposition that reading widely and adventurously should be a central college experience that can lead to deep social connections and lifelong learning in any field.

I invite you to peruse our events calendar and our research and teaching programs to find something of interest. If you have ideas for projects, programs, or collaborations, please be in touch!