About the Fox Center
What We Do
Emory University’s Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry (FCHI) supports ambitious research on culture, history, and society. We house a community of scholars working on individual and collaborative projects, and we design programming for the university and the broader community.
At the core of our activities is a set of residential research fellowships. Each year, we select faculty and advanced graduate students from Emory University, and postdoctoral fellows from around the world, to devote uninterrupted time to research and writing on large-scale projects. They meet weekly to share their work in progress—sometimes with invited guests from other universities—and to discuss important themes and issues in the humanities. We also provide mentorship and community for acohort of talented undergraduate students writing honors theses on humanistic topics.
We host speakers and symposia on a broad range of topics, from poetry and ecology to democracy and tyranny, and every two years we bring a world-class writer to campus for the Ellmann Lectures in Modern Literature. (All of these events are open to the public.) We also convene working groups of faculty and graduate students who are planning conferences, collaborative research with community partners, curricular innovations, and publications through our seminar and hub programs. We help Emory faculty find new audiences for their work through book launches, podcasts, and a digital publishing initiative. We sponsor short-form courses (sometimes off-site) for the Atlanta community. And we are launching a new program, Asking the Big Questions, that creates intellectual community for undergraduates in all disciplines through shared experiences of reading widely and adventurously.
Who We Are
The director position, currently held by English professor Benjamin Reiss, is a rotating appointment held by a senior faculty member at Emory. Our staff are highly credentialed administrators with strong backgrounds in the humanities. Our Executive Committee is comprised of distinguished faculty from across the humanities at Emory (including some who are doing humanistic work in other disciplines). Read more about our team.
Each year, more than a dozen scholars work full-time at the Center as part of our fellowship programs. Postdoctoral fellows come to us from universities stretching from California to Japan, while our faculty come from more than twenty departments and our undergraduate students from almost forty majors. We work across three buildings on North Decatur Road, across the street from Emory’s main quad.
Our History
Sparked by the grassroots advocacy of Emory faculty, the Fox Center was founded in Fall 2000 by the Deans of Emory College of Arts and Sciences and Laney Graduate School. The originators envisioned a Center that would promote individual research, while also increasing the impact of the humanities across Emory University and in Atlanta, the region, and the nation. Since 2000, we have hosted 110 faculty fellows, 92 postdoctoral fellows, and 66 dissertation completion fellows. Browse some of the books published by our former fellows.
The FCHI is named in honor of the late Bill Fox '79G and Carol Fox, in tribute to their long and devoted service to Emory and to its students, faculty, administration, and alumni. As a couple, the Foxes' deep intellectual and personal commitments to the fundamental role of the humanities in education, both at Emory and in the larger communities it serves, are reflected in the mission of the Center.
Past directors include Martine Brownley (English); Walter Melion (Art History); and Carla Freeman (Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies).