Strategic University Initiatives and Beyond

Carolina Seminars is committed to building community together by forging intellectual and social connections among faculty, staff, and students across the University. Our 38 Seminars represent 28 different departments and 7 different centers and schools across the University. Our conveners continue to build relationships  with academic partners including: Duke, UNC-Greensboro, NC State, Wake Forest University, Appalachian State, Harvard, University of California-Irvine, University of Iowa, University of Singapore, and King’s College of London. Additionally, Seminars have partnered with communities on campus, in the state, and beyond from El Futuro (Durham), Chapel Hill Training, UNC Alliance, Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center, and the Carolina Indian Circle as well as with granting agencies like the National Institute of Health, the Luce Foundation, Society for Family Planning, and Patient Centered Outcomes for Research. 

Strengthen Student Success

One of Carolina Seminars’ greatest strengths is its long and robust history of providing financial support and intellectual space for events and activities that directly and meaningfully contribute to undergraduate and graduate student success. From film screenings to research symposia, dissertation chapter workshops and networking opportunities, our Seminars prioritize events and activities that encourage students “to become lifelong learners, approaching the world with curiosity and open minds,” as described in the IDEAS in Action General Education Curriculum. For example, Triangle Intellectual History celebrated its 30th year and remains one of the most preeminent spaces nationally for the discussion of intellectual history, of great benefit to Triangle area faculty and graduate students, particularly through their Capper Fellowship. 

Enable Career Development

Carolina Seminars creates opportunities for scholars at all stages of their career to collaborate and build networks around shared areas of inquiry. Almost all of our Seminars feature a mix of junior and senior faculty and staff, as well as graduate students. Our Seminars serve as crucial sites for mentorship and skill-sharing so that graduate students and junior faculty can better navigate a turbulent global economy and workplace. By growing and deepening intra- and inter-institutional connections, our Seminars are committed to building disciplinary community and campus networks. For example, our new FieldNotes initiative–co-sponsored by Dr. Karla Slocum, Associate Dean for Faculty and Staff Development–is designed to create interdisciplinary networks around shared areas of scholarship; our current FieldNotes working groups include UNC Caribbeanists; Health, Wellness, and Communities of Color; and Global Indigeneity and American Indian Studies.

Discover

Carolina Seminars is a premier site on campus for “exploring new ideas, solving problems, imagining different ways of seeing, working to fill gaps in human knowledge.” To this end, the Seminars  currently offer three different funding models: traditional seminars, problem-based seminars, and FieldNotes working groups. These formats enable both focused and sustained inquiry and our conveners have used Carolina Seminars funding to create countless journal articles, edited volumes, and conferences. For example, the French History and Culture Seminar shared on their website a non-exhaustive and ever-growing list of nearly fifty books and articles that have been workshopped in the Seminar on their way to publication. By encouraging collaboration and funding research, the Seminars’ interdisciplinary emphasis creates links across areas of inquiry that challenges the separation often imposed by disciplinary silos, reflecting our commitment to funding diverse forms of scholarship and knowledge-production. 

Promote Democracy

Each of our Seminars carries forth the University’s strategic initiative to promote democracy by enlarging the capacity of citizens and participants to understand and freely and equitably participate in the democratic process. For example, following the 9/11 attacks, participants in the Islam seminar gave 200 presentations publicly on Islam. This year, Seminar programming explicitly focused on the democratic process include: the Triangle Intellectual History’s seminar proposed theme for the 25-26 academic year is “Democracy,” exploring the dilemmas democracy has come to face, and imagine, as historians, suggestions as to how we may put our universities in good stead in the public sphere. 

Serve to Benefit Society

The work that our Seminars undertake upholds the University’s commitment to extending “knowledge-based services and other resources of the University to the citizens of North Carolina and their institutions to enhance the quality of life for all people in the state.” In this vein, our Seminars make visible and tangible impacts at the local and national levels.

• The Criminal Justice and Health Seminar spotlighted cutting-edge research at UNC, including interventions to reduce COVID-19 disease burden in NC jails; Justice Core, a pre-trial diversion intervention for pregnant people with substance-abuse disorders; and Criminal Justice Administrative Records System (CJARS), a cutting-edge data platform designed to fundamentally transform research and statistical reporting on the U.S. criminal justice system.
• Carolina Seminar on Educational Inequality held research talks exploring the need for comprehensive, evidence-based approaches to stabilize and strengthen the teacher workforce, how to better promote teacher productivity, and how school improvement policies affect students and educators in low-performing schools in North Carolina.
• Bring on the Heat: Charting a Path through Perimenopause Based on the Latest Science hosted Zoom webinars and meetings, in-person exercise training sessions, yoga classes, group walks, and stakeholder dinners and explored topics including general overviews of menopause, menopause and sleep, pelvic and sexual health during menopause, and identifying medical misinformation on the internet. 

These examples reflect the timely, engaged, and highly specialized research made possible by Carolina Seminar funds.

Globalize

The programming offered by our Seminars over the last 35 years have engaged with every continent on the globe, elevating Carolina’s impressive national and international research profile. During this time, we have supported programming centered around German Studies, Jewish Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, Central Europe, Russian imperialism, Southeast Asia, Global Indigeneity, Africa Studies, and Caribbean Studies, just to name a few. The programming these Seminars exhibited allow our communities near and far to get dimensional experience with the world. For example, the Decolonization in the Global South Seminar hosted a conference co-sponsored by the Southeast Asian Approaches Seminar and the Carolina Asia Center (CAC); CAC and Southeast Asian Approaches pooled resources and staged a series of events, talks, and exhibits relevant to the 50th Anniversary of the End of the Vietnam War, with events held in Ackland Art Museum and Wilson Library. 

Optimize Operations

Carolina Seminars is operated by a part-time staff of 3 women. This staff oversees 35 seminars and 70 faculty and staff conveners, sponsoring events that reach over 5,000 people annually, echoing the tremendous return on investment demonstrated our Seminars. We at Carolina Seminars have been nimble and responsive to a changing University landscape, reimagining the Douglass Hunt Lecture as a series of pop-ups, reflecting a diversity of intellectual projects across campus. Using the pop-up model, we supported the Arts of Social Change in Africa (April 10-11), which also had a statewide teacher education component. We also supported the 25th anniversary of the Black Queer Studies Conference (March 24-26), which had over 300 registrants from across the state and across the country. We will also support programming around the 50th anniversary of the Women’s and Gender Studies Department at UNC. Pop-ups are temporary, flexible showcases that include a wide range of activities and are not tied to a specific intellectual or geographic location. Importantly, reimagining the Hunt Lecture provided a way to optimally invest our money in the most possible programs that reach the widest possible audience.