Jeffrey Cox, professor of English at Texas A&M University, has been named the first director of the Center for Humanities and the Arts at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
The center was launched in the spring of 1997 as an interdisciplinary program uniting the humanities and arts departments across campus.
The center sponsors colloquia, lectures, performances, exhibitions and research analyzing contemporary issues. First-year activities have addressed the theme of "Civility and Censorship: Critical Conversations in a Civil Society." Next years theme will be "Beauty and Its Discontents."
Cox, who will come to CU-Boulder in mid-August, has directed a similar effort at Texas A&M, called the Interdisciplinary Group for Humanities Studies. In that position, he built an impressive record of bringing faculty together across the humanities, establishing mentoring relationships between junior and senior faculty, and drawing respected guest speakers to the campus, said John Stevenson, chair of the English Department and of the search committee.
"We felt like he represented the best combination of strong scholarship and administrative gifts of anyone we saw in our pool of applicants," said Stevenson. "The search committee, which included representatives of nine different departments, reached a clear consensus on his selection."
A specialist in Romanticism, Cox will teach in the Comparative Literature and Humanities Department at CU-Boulder.
Cox earned a bachelors degree with high honors in English from Wesleyan University in 1975 and a doctorate from the University of Virginia in 1981. He joined the faculty at Texas A&M University in 1981, and he was promoted to full professor in 1994.
He has written or edited five books, including two that are forthcoming from publishers: "Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School: Shelley, Keats, Hunt and Their Circle" (1998) and "Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation in the British Romantic Period, Vol. 5: The Drama" (1999).
Cox said he was impressed with the faculty at CU-Boulder and looks forward to his work in developing the new center.
"Theres an extremely good faculty across the disciplines in the humanities and the arts at Colorado," he said. "Theres a great deal of good work being done and intellectual energy there. Its a function of the center to support that intellectual work and give it visibility."
Carol Lynch, dean of the Graduate School, and Peter Spear, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, spearheaded the initiative to create a center for the humanities and arts on campus with support from former Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs Wallace Loh.
"The idea to create a center as a focus of high-quality interdisciplinary activities in the humanities and arts on campus goes back eight to 10 years and has a lot of support from faculty," Lynch said, noting that the center offers many opportunities for public outreach as well as a substantial endowment of almost $4 million to attract top-quality graduate students.
CU-Boulder Professors Christopher Braider, Merrill Lesley and Warren Motte have served as the centers interim directors while a national search was conducted to fill the position.