Seeta Chaganti, associate professor of English, has been appointed interim director of the UC Davis Humanities Institute while a search proceeds for a permanent successor to Carolyn de la Peña, who had led the institute since 2007.

De la Peña, a professor of American studies, took up a new administrative position Jan. 1: interim vice provost for Undergraduate Education. The institute invites the campus community to a farewell reception for de la Peña, 4:30 to 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, Jan. 22, in 126 Voorhies Hall.

“Carolyn was an outstanding director, and the Davis Humanities Institute has flourished,” said Jessie Ann Owens, dean of Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies. “I am confident that Seeta will bring her own distinctive strengths to the position of interim director.”

Last year Chaganti received an outstanding mentor award from the UC Davis Consortium for Women and Research.

Owens appointed Chaganti to a six-month term, Jan. 1-June 30. Meanwhile, the dean announced a Feb. 1 deadline for applications and nominations to serve as the director on a permanent basis starting July 1. A faculty recruitment advisory committee will review the candidates (who must be tenured professors), select finalists for interviews, and recommend qualified finalists to the dean. Read the announcement.

The director leads the institute in fostering interdisciplinary collaboration between departments and scholars in the humanities and humanistic social sciences; advocates for humanists in the larger campus community; oversees the institute’s programming; and serves as the UC Davis liaison to the UC Humanities Network.

“I’m very excited about this opportunity to take the helm of the DHI for the remainder of this year,” Chaganti said. “Carolyn de la Peña has done such a wonderful job exploring the possibilities of truly interdisciplinary inquiry through the DHI — not only within the humanities, but also across divisions.

“Now that our faculty have begun to work in these collaborative ways, I am interested in using the DHI as a forum for entering into a metadiscourse about such interdisciplinarity: What have its implications been for different fields? What new challenges has it created?”

Chaganti received her Ph.D. in English from Yale in 2001 and joined the UC Davis faculty the same year. A specialist in Old and Middle English poetry, she is the author of The Medieval Poetics of the Reliquary: Enshrinement, Inscription, Performance and numerous articles, and the editor of Medieval Poetics and Social Practice: Responding to the Work of Penn R. Szittya. Additionally, she blogs for Stanford’s Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies.

As a medievalist, Chaganti said she sees her research informing her work at the Davis Humanities Institute.

“My focus on medieval studies has always been inflected by a desire to uncover the surprising intersections between premodern and postmodern culture,” she said. “I hope that this personal scholarly goal will also benefit my interim leadership of the DHI, in that I would like the institute to offer a forum to discuss questions of periodization and the complex role of the premodern in narratives about the construction of modernity and postmodernity.

“I hope that the DHI can use these questions to contribute to larger debates about the meaning and role of the humanities right now.”

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