Professor McArthur Freeman Selected to Receive Inaugural USF Humanities Faculty Fellowship

McArthur Freeman, USF associate professor of animation and digital modeling at the School of Art & Art History, has been selected as one of a cohort of three faculty fellows to receive the inaugural USF Humanities Faculty Fellowship.

The fellowship will facilitate an interdisciplinary research collaboration with two other USF Faculty, Tangela Serls, a Black feminist literary scholar and Instructor in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies, and David Ponton, an assistant professor in Africana Studies. Through their research theme, Re-imagining Blackness: Storytelling the End of the (Racialized) World, they will produce a body of research that includes articles, book chapters, and interactive projects related to an issue central to the humanities: how anti-blackness imposes on what it means to be human.

With three faculty members from distinct departments or schools, the program is designed to allow an interdisciplinary faculty cluster to build a customized year-long fellowship at the Humanities Institute. The Fellowship Cohort will design a fellowship program that facilitates intellectual freedom and independent inquiry, while enhancing the visibility of the humanities at USF. The Fellowship Cohort may design and self-direct a program suited to meeting that group’s short-term goals and each fellow’s individual long-term research goals.

The Humanities Institute (HI) at the University of South Florida has been supporting research and innovations in the humanities and relevant social sciences since 2003. HI enhances the educational experience of students, faculty, and the community through public lectures, programs, symposia, and other events. The USF Humanities Institute Faculty Fellows Program is designed to support original scholarly and creative work by USF faculty and enhance the research profile of the humanities internally at USF and externally, through public humanities and across varying humanities disciplines.