August, 2026

Dear CAHI friends and colleagues:

As the new leadership at CAHI, we would like to offer you a warm welcome and introduce ourselves and our plans for CAHI during our term, 2026-2030.

First, we want to offer our heartfelt gratitude to Professors Brenda Weber and Ellen Wu for their leadership over the past four years. From new initiatives to excellent programming, to creative fundraising, they have left CAHI in an excellent position for its next phase. Indeed, some of their initiatives will carry over into 2026-27, including a much-anticipated and timely visit on October 6 from Carol Anderson, author of the acclaimed book, One Person, No Vote.

We will continue CAHI’s basic work of bringing exciting programming to campus, funding research in the arts and humanities, broadly understood, and providing course releases for scholars engaged in major projects. But we will do so understanding that the “liberal arts”, for lack of a better term, face an unprecedented assault on their fundamental raison d’être and their place in university curricula and research.

CAHI’s role in the College and on campus is to promote the arts and humanities. But we believe that part of our mission is pro-actively to defend humanistic learning and research, as well as creative activity, as both an essential part of what it means to be an R1 university and what it means to be human. We intend to do so in a collaborative, public-facing, and inclusive way as much as possible. Those watchwords will also guide some of our fundraising, programming, and awarding of grants. We want, above all, to serve as a creative hub for all College (and indeed, campus) faculty and graduate students interested in the arts and humanities. For starters, we hope as many of you as possible will attend the CAHI Open House on Wednesday, September 2, 4:00-6:00 pm, to meet us and learn more about what we are about. Come, and bring a friend.

We also urge you to follow our programming closely, either by reading the newsletter we will begin sending out when the semester starts and/or by checking our events calendar on a regular basis.

Scheduled fall highlights already include:

September 10: Meet the Author discussion with Sarah Phillips
CAHI and Granfalloon present a Meet the Author talk with Sarah Phillips (Anthropology) in conversation with Russell Valentino (Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures) about Phillips’ recent book, Kurt Vonnegut in the USSR (Bloomsbury, 2026).

October 6: Carol Anderson at the Buskirk-Chumley Theater
This fall, CAHI presents  Carol Anderson, bestselling author of the books White Rage, One Person, No Vote, and The Second. Anderson is a preeminent historian of African American history and oppression, and an influential voice of civil and voting rights. This event is free and open to the public. Tickets will be available soon at the BCT Box Office.

October 8: Celebrating 25 Years of CAHI
Join us at Maxwell Hall for an all-day symposium celebrating CAHI’s 25th anniversary, with a keynote by Sara Guyer, Irving and Jean Stone Dean of the Division of Arts & Humanities at UC Berkeley. More details to follow.

Above all, we invite you not just to attend CAHI events or to apply for grants (the first deadlines are September 15, for graduate students), but to collaborate with us. Do you have a major speaker you would like to bring? Make a suggestion to us or to a member of the CAHI Faculty Board (listed below). A workshop you would like to develop? Consult with us. An idea for a collaborative project or grant? We are happy to kick around ideas with you, and look forward to hosting Arts and Humanities Hangouts this year so we can gather, strategize, and reflect on how we would like to see ourselves moving into the future.

We both look forward to working with all of you,

Alex Lichtenstein, CAHI Director (on leave fall 2026)
Debbie Cohn, CAHI Acting Director

CAHI Board
Maria Hamilton Abegunde (2028)
Akinwumi Adesokan (2028)
Gardner Bovingdon (2030)
Alison Calhoun (2027)
Ayesha K. Hardison (2030)
Solimar Otero (2027)
Diane Reilly (2029)
Tracy Templeton (2029)