Annual Event

Dr. Amy J. Elias is a specialist in post-1960s arts as well as humanities institutionalism, and primarily teaches in the areas of speculative fiction, narrative theory, and contemporary literature. She currently serves as Director of the Denbo Center for Humanities & the Arts. Elias is the author of Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s Fiction (Johns Hopkins UP, 2001), which was winner of the George and Barbara Perkins Book Prize from the International Society for the Study of Narrative, two journal special issues, and more than 35 articles and book chapters. She is editor of Speculative Light: The Arts of Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin (Duke UP, 2025) and co-editor of The Planetary Turn: Relationality and Geoaesthetics in the Twenty-First Century (Northwestern UP, 2015) and Time: A Vocabulary of the Present (NYU Press, 2016). She was principal founder of the international arts association ASAP: The Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present and the founding co-editor-in-chief of its scholarly journal ASAP/Journal (Johns Hopkins UP), which won three national publishing awards. She has been the recipient of NEH grants for cross-disciplinary research in humanities computing, public humanities engagement, and literature and values. As director of the Denbo Center, she is a member of the executive boards of Humanities Tennessee, The Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes, Big Ears Festival, the UTK Institute for American Civics, Knoxville’s Delaney Legacy Project, and UT Africana Studies.

London best-seller. He has been the recipient of writing fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Lyndhurst Foundation, and the Alicia Patterson Foundation. Since 1998 he has been on the faculty of the creative writing program at the University of Pennsylvania, and for two decades before that he was a staff writer at The Washington Post. In 2009 he was a joint visiting professor of documentary practice at Duke University and of American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He lives with his wife, Cecilia, a retired nurse, outside Philadelphia and in Washington, D.C.