UCHRI Welcomes a New Director: Jaimey Fisher

As I begin my five-year term as director of UCHRI, I think back to the many achievements of UCHRI and the UC Humanities Network—it has been incredibly inspiring to collaborate with colleagues around the system and to contribute to the dynamic work being done far and wide in our state. This kind of active and on-going cross-campus collaboration will be at the heart of my time as UCHRI director: As Director of the UC Davis Humanities Institute (2016-2022) and co-chair of the Consortium of UC Humanities Institutes and Centers (2021-22), I was involved with assorted multicampus collaborations, including on topics like public-facing, engaged scholarship; productive approaches to publishing; and the effective, especially visual, presentation of humanities research. Particularly public and engaged scholarship offered a strong basis for collaborations among the UC centers and institutes, highlighting how the humanities can impact our students, communities, and the broader world around us.  

Over 21 years at the UC, my own scholarship has focused primarily on film and media studies, especially because I see the complex influence, positive and negative, that media can have in our everyday lives. My focus has been the tumultuous modernity of central Europe, which highlights the tensions between media and conventional culture as well as the media’s role in socio-political upheavals in the West, from the rise of the nation-state to multiple world wars to postwar democratization in Europe. My appreciation of media as impactful culture also derives from growing up in rural places.  I am from small-town New England in an area that was devastated by environmental decisions of a multi-national corporation, but that also happens to be near a college town that is teeming with museums, lectures, and theater—I could see the palpable difference that culture and the arts can make in working people’s lives. On the other hand, my childhood was also spent visiting California, specifically San Francisco’s Chinatown and then Fremont in the Bay Area, where my grandparents moved from East Asia. It inclined me to California (obviously!) and all that it represents as a land of multiplicity, innovation, and incredible natural beauty, and an inspiration to people around the world, especially people who sacrifice and work hard to arrive, thrive, and contribute here.

A key function of UCHRI, to my mind, is to raise the profile of the humanities and humanities research on individual campuses as well as around the state. Such profile-raising for the humanities will require active collaboration to leverage the reach and scale of the humanities and arts across our ten historic and influential campuses, involving thousands of faculty members and graduate students. My tenure will focus on furthering a humanities engaged in and with the world by supporting our network and by fostering new research conversations and collaborations among faculty in order to address the big questions of our time.  

That is, for me, a central message of our work: that the humanities can contribute perspectives and contexts, even norms and planning, to central challenges that we face. These include the changing character of democracy, civic education, and community building; climate change; the socio-cultural impact of technology, including social media and AI; public health; the fight against racism and bigotry in all forms; and the importance and challenges of immigration in a global world. Some of my own scholarly background will doubtless inform my time with UCHRI. For example, recent history all over the world has clarified just how important media literacy is for our culture and polity, for our personal happiness, and for a vibrant democracy.

A key part of this sort of engaged humanities is public programming that highlights, for community members as well as for academics, the urgent import of humanistic perspectives for our contemporary world. At the DHI we sought to offer programs with broad public appeal on critical topics facing us now: public health, technological innovation, the food chain and security, the new wars based on contentious histories as well as raw power grabs, the erosion of democracy here and around the world, environmental degradation and climate change, etc. For these public facing programs, when COVID necessitated moving online, we created DHI YouTube and podcast channels, which saw excellent uptake and impact. Our biggest audiences ever joined via this format, confirming how remote events offer an enormous opportunity for UCHRI’s impact.

A core part of these efforts involved active collaboration with our STEM colleagues and departments around the university. Our public events at the DHI often paired an expert from the humanities/arts with one from the STEM fields to converse about important topics of the day. Because they also believe in the benefits of critical thinking at the core of the humanities, many STEM colleagues expressed their eagerness to find partners on the humanities side and were very experienced at working collaboratively—the STEM fields are so big (and getting bigger) in comparison to the humanities and arts that one can find many STEM colleagues inclined toward this kind of collaboration. UCHRI will sponsor programs that encourage and support these kinds of interdisciplinary collaborations—as I developed at the DHI with our SHAPE as well as “Transcollege Clusters” programs. Crucial to these efforts will be creating the intellectual and social infrastructure to do so, for example, by helping to organize networking events that foster cross-disciplinary partnering.

As I close, I would like to send an enormous thank you to Distinguished Professor Julia Lupton, the interim director from 2022 to 2025, for stewarding UCHRI in its transitional phase—far more than merely minding the shop, she has been an inspiring leader in fostering the networked activities that are essential to UCHRI and the humanities in general. My gratitude goes as well as to Katherine Newman, the UC Provost and Executive Vice President of Academic Affairs, and to UC Davis Distinguished Professor Ralph Hexter and UC Santa Barbara Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost David Marshall, who have helped put UCHRI on its new footing. The UCHRI staff has been indispensable in this tricky time, and I am grateful to them for their work and their warm welcome of me as I start my term. I also want to thank Distinguished Professor David Theo Goldberg, who so effectively guided and so extensively built up UCHRI in his time as its director.