A Message from Director, Graziella Parati

Dear Colleagues,

After two years as Director of the Leslie Center, I need to give an account of the direction in which the Center is moving and describe future projects.

Since Summer 2015, the center's goal has been to transform the center into a familiar intellectual home for the faculty, to make it visible for the larger community, and to open the Center to students, adjuncts, and staff.

We have had a number of well-known and provocative events, we strived to achieve a pedagogical impact on campus, and we have funded exceptional and innovative research. We have pursued interdisciplinary goals and paid particular attention to diversity among the people who have come to share their work with us.

Humanities Labs are offered for the first time this year and in 2018-19, the Humanities Center is partially supporting courses that are offered under the rubric of "Revolution," followed by a second theme "Equality", in 2019-20.

The Center has the goal of being inclusive and of encouraging intellectual exchange. In the next two years we will have fewer writers coming to campus in order to use the funding at our disposal to support research and activities that are, in particular, but not exclusively, interdisciplinary and socially engaged. We will continue with the Humanities 3.0 series, the refugee series, the weekly lunches, digital humanities, the lab. courses, the theme courses and most of those projects that have proved successful.

Of course, we need to continue on the path of innovation and two new major initiatives will start in the Fall with your collaboration.

THE GREEN CHAIR: we will ask any member of the humanities faculty to sit on a green chair and explain in no more than 2 minutes their research. The presentation must be free of academic jargon. I will be pestering all of you to sit on the hot green chair. The result will be posted on our web site and hopefully Dartmouth you tube.

POP-UP HUMANITIES: this is an initiative that will mainly involve students, but I need your collaboration to make it work. These are unannounced events that last a couple of minutes and pop-up all over campus. It could be a music student who is rehearsing a piece and shows up in the new science building in-between classes and pays a snippet there. It could be a student taking a creative writing course and read a very short piece in Dartmouth Hall. It could be a student who is taking my Fall course on Fascisms and reads in the middle of the Green a short paragraph from a book/article that he/she finds particularly poignant. The goal is to make the humanities and the arts a part of daily life at Dartmouth. Feel free to ask students to do that and I will be in contact about logistics.

PODCASTS: we need to have short interviews with the people we invite to campus and place the podcast of that interview on our web-sites (the inviting department and the Leslie Center) so that we show students and the world around us the intellectual vitality that dominates our daily lives.

Of course, none of this can happen without you. I need to receive your thoughts about the Center's future plans and I would like to invite you all to get involved in these initiatives as I won't be able to run them, teach, and continue writing.

I look forward to working with you.

Cordialmente, Graziella

Graziella Parati
Paul D. Paganucci Professor of Italian Literature and Language
DIRECTOR OF THE LESLIE CENTER FOR THE HUMANITIES
HB 6240 Haldeman Center, room 261
Dartmouth College
Hanover NH 03755
Professor of Italian with Joint Titles in Comparative Literature and Women's and Gender Studies