Hall Family Foundation awards $512K to support Hall Center programs

LAWRENCE — The Hall Family Foundation has granted the Hall Center for the Humanities $512,000 for programming support. The grant includes funds for two new initiatives, the Visiting Scholars program and the Elevated Annual Lecture, and it renews support for the Applied Humanities Program.

“We are pleased to provide this support to the Hall Center for the Humanities,” said Angela Smart, vice president of the Hall Family Foundation. “These initiatives will continue to elevate the reputation of the Hall Center, in the region and on national and international levels. They build upon the Hall Center’s excellent programs while supporting KU’s Bold Aspirations strategic plan.”

The Hall Center intends to broaden its fellowship support by placing visiting faculty alongside fellows drawn from KU’s humanities faculty. The Visiting Scholars program will invite international and U.S. scholars for extended visits, giving them the opportunity to present their research, address graduate classes and spend time with KU faculty in their field of expertise. The Hall Center instituted a visiting regional scholars program in fall 2015, courtesy of the William T. Kemper Foundation, and the new Visiting Scholars program will now add to the amount and kinds of visiting fellowships.

The Elevated Annual Lecture will be a welcome addition to the Hall Center’s banner public program, the Humanities Lecture Series. The Hall Family Foundation grant will support the invitation of a public intellectual of international renown to launch the Humanities Lecture Series each year.

The Hall Center was recently awarded the Midwestern Association of Graduate Schools’ 2015-2016 Award for Excellence, recognizing the applied humanities programs for graduate students that have been provided for the past two years. The Hall Family Foundation will continue to support these initiatives, including Applied Humanities Boot Camps, graduate student internships with Kansas City nonprofit institutions and applied humanities panel discussions.

“The Hall Family Foundation’s grant,” said Victor Bailey, director of the Hall Center, “will allow us to enrich our residential fellowship program by inviting national and international scholars to interact with KU faculty and graduate students for extended periods of time, will add a high-end capstone to the Humanities Lecture Series and will help graduate students learn more about pursuing alternatives to faculty appointments. We are extremely grateful for the foundation’s generous and continuing support.”

The Hall Center’s mission is to stimulate and support research in the humanities, arts and social sciences, especially of an interdisciplinary kind, at KU. The center brings together faculty and graduate students with common interests from various disciplines to enable them to build on each other’s ideas and to share their knowledge within the university and with the wider community.

The gift counts toward Far Above: The Campaign for Kansas, the university’s comprehensive fundraising campaign. Far Above seeks support to educate future leaders, advance medicine, accelerate discovery and drive economic growth to seize the opportunities of the future.

The campaign is managed by KU Endowment, the independent, nonprofit organization serving as the official fundraising and fund-management organization for KU. Founded in 1891, KU Endowment was the first foundation of its kind at a U.S. public university.