Purpose
Founded in 1991, the Carolina Seminars program is built around in-depth initiatives designed to study complex problems and issues, bridge disciplinary boundaries, and enrich academic discourse. Seminars are faculty- and staff-driven curiosity hubs that investigate particular intellectual concerns from the Promise and Perils of Capitalism, to African Ecology and Social Processes, to Moral Economies of Medicine. We offer annual funding to seminars organized around shared areas of inquiry. Currently, we offer three different funding models: annually renewable traditional seminars, 2-year problem-based seminars, and 1-year FieldNotes working groups. These funding models enable Seminars to pursue long-term collaborations and conversations, specific projects (journal articles, edited volumes, conferences), or opportunities for networking and community-building across campus.
The Seminars serve the “of the public, for the public” mission of the University to the people of North Carolina and beyond through an expanding collaborative effort on timely topics of interest to policy and scholarly exchange. According to Professor and founding director Ruel Tyson, “The Carolina Seminars provide an opportunity to build bridges between scholars and researchers on campus and their kind elsewhere. It will help create a sense of community among those whose work usually separates them from one another.” Since its founding, Carolina Seminars has proudly sponsored spaces of innovation, collaboration, and cultural and scholarly production that carries forth the mission of the University and fosters the success and prosperity of each rising generation.
For nearly 35 years, Carolina Seminars has supported collaborative study and outreach on UNC’s campus and beyond, driven by three key commitments:
- The Seminars function as an interdisciplinary hub that unites inquiry across a vast range of intellectual pursuits. For example, we have hosted Seminars focusing on rural maternal health, labor and working class history, French history and culture, perimenopausal research, mathematical biology, free speech, Indigenous communities, and film studies.
- The Seminars support faculty-driven curiosity that leads to scholarly innovation and global collaboration. For example, our Critical Game Studies seminar has partnered with faculty at King’s College London to co-design a shared research study on student play practices in the game studies classroom, and using data gathered in courses taught at UNC and KCL in coming years to generate data for a longitudinal study.
- Seminar conveners, both faculty and staff, directly contribute to student success through professionalization, experiential learning, and on- and off-campus engagement. For example, the Seminar on Middle East Studies supported emerging scholars and graduate students by providing platforms to present in-progress work, such as paper workshops and student-led presentations, and by offering mentoring sessions on fieldwork and professional development–cultivating skills that are critical for academic success and visibility in their fields.
Underscored by these commitments, Carolina Seminars has been crucial to the University’s public engagement mission in the state, nation, and wider world by reaching over five thousand people annually and forging energizing spaces of inquiry and community. For more information about how the Seminars accomplish the University’s strategic initiatives, see here. Looking ahead, we seek opportunities to build on the University’s legacy while reimagining how it supports the intellectual and community endeavors of multiple publics. Each seminar dollar generates invaluable goodwill among faculty and staff conveners and a return on investment of over 1000%. One example of this is the partnership between two traditional seminars– Decolonization in the Global South and Southeast Asian Approaches–who received a $900,000 grant from the Luce Foundation using their annual combined allotment of $3200 with additional support from the Carolina Asia Center.
History
The Carolina Seminars are supported by the Massey-Weatherspoon Fund, which was established in 1984 by three generations of the Massey and Weatherspoon families. Alumnus C. Knox Massey, established the awards to recognize university employees for “unusual, meritorious or superior contribution” to the university. In 1984 Massey joined his son, C. Knox Massey, Jr., and daughter, Kay Massey Weatherspoon, in establishing the Massey Weatherspoon Fund. These funds thus made possible the creation, in 1991, of Carolina Seminars, a program dedicated to bringing scholars together for collaboration.
Chancellor Paul Hardin announced the creation of the Carolina Seminars in September of 1991 and Ruel Tyson was named Founding Director. James Peacock became Director in 1997 and served in that position for sixteen years followed by Andrew J. Perrin as Director in 2014. In February 2020, Tanya Shields was named the fourth Director of the Carolina Seminars.
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