CHCI Announces Three New Members of the International Advisory Board

We are excited to announce the election of three new members to the CHCI International Advisory Board: Eileen Julien, Pablo Oyarzún, and Wang Hui.

These three new board members are leading scholars in the disciplines of history, literature, and philosophy. Along with adding the perspectives of new institutions to the board, they provide critical insight into humanities research and instruction in and about Africa and the African diaspora, the Midwest, the Atlantic World, continental Europe, South America, and East Asia.

In addition, three current board members have been re-elected: Judith Buchanan, Elizabeth Giorgis, and Gary Tomlinson. Judith Buchanan is the former director of the Humanities Research Centre and current Dean of Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University of York. Elizabeth Giorgis is the Director of the Modern Art Museum: Gebre Kristos Desta Center at Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia. Gary Tomlinson is the Director of the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University. Full profiles of our board members can be found here.

Comprised of current and former directors of leading humanities centers and institutes from around the world, the International Advisory Board provides the intellectual leadership that is key to identifying emerging opportunities for international collaborations with a transformative effect on scholarly inquiry and conversation on major issues of public concern in the 21st century.

Eileen Julien is the Director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Indiana University Bloomington. She is a professor of Comparative Literature, French and Italian, and African Studies, and she teaches and publishes on the literatures and cultures of Africa, the Americas, and France in their interrelationships. A recipient of Bunting Institute, Fulbright, and Guggenheim awards, she was a member of the ACLS-SSRC Joint Committee on African Studies (1993-96), founding director of the West African Research Center (Dakar, Senegal, 1993-95), and co-founder of the New Orléans Afrikan Film and Arts Festival (2008-12).

Pablo Oyarzún is the Director of the Interdisciplinary Center of Studies in Philosophy, Arts, and Humanities at the University of Chile. He is also a Director of the Central Seminar of Research at the Institute of Arts of the Pontifical Catholic University of Valparaiso. With more than 400 publications, his work focuses on the topics of metaphyics and ontology, moral and political philosophy, epistemology, philosophy of language, aesthetics, and theory of arts and literature, culture, education, and culture. At the University of Chile, he serve as Vice Dean (1991-1994) and Dean (2003-2010) of the Faculty of Arts and is currently Executive Director of the Bicentennial Initiative for the Revitalization of Humanities, Arts, Social Sciences, and Communication.

Wang Hui is the founding Director of the Tsinghua Institute for Advanced Study in Humanities and Social Science (TIAS) at the Tsinghua University, Beijing, where he is Distinguished Professor of Literature and History. One of the esteemed scholars in the fields of intellectual history, social theory, and modern literature, and a leading figure of the “Chinese New Left,” Wang Hui’s work charts the intellectual and political conditions of contemporary China with particular attention paid to the history and consequences of Chinese modernity. In recognition of his scholarly work, Wang Hui has received numerous awards, such as the 2013 Luca Pacioli Prize (awarded to outstanding international intellectual; shared with Jürgen Habermas) and the 2018 Anneliese Maier Research Award (for outstanding scholarship in the humanities and social sciences).

At the same time that we welcome these new and returning board members, we are saying farewell to Helmut Müller-Sievers (Director of the Center for Humanities and the Arts at the University of Colorado Boulder) and Robert Phiddian (Director of the Australasian Consortium of Humanities Research Centres at Flinders University). Their service on the board and contributions to CHCI have been invaluable and they will be missed.