To our colleagues, students, and friends in the CHR community--
You are warmly invited to join us for a celebratory coffee hour in honor of outgoing CHR Director Alison Landsberg on Thursday, April 18 at 11 am in the 6th floor kitchen of Horizon Hall. Light refreshments provided.
As CHR’s inaugural director (2020-present), Alison Landsberg (Professor, History and Art History; Cultural Studies) has been a wonderful leader, colleague, and mentor. Through her masterful running of the CHR residential fellowship cohort program, she has challenged us to push the boundaries of our thinking and research and to investigate and incorporate new, interdisciplinary insights and lines of inquiry in our work. In the wake of the pandemic, she established a new and robust community of humanities scholars who now come together, regularly, to present and interrogate both new work and work-in-progress. These CHR events and traditions have made us all more interconnected and our thinking more agile. We hear that they have given the humanities a real place, a home at Mason.
Alison has also been a tireless advocate for the humanities here at Mason more generally, well beyond the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, even changing the way we talk about our work. As we’ve long understood, but are now more empowered than ever to advertise, humanities scholars at Mason, in CHSS and beyond, produce innovative scholarship that is equal in importance and impact to the research produced in the STEM fields. Under her leadership, the CHR has developed into a dynamic incubator of humanities research, and scholars have—independently, but most importantly, and in the spirit of CHR’s cohort, in collaboration—produced meaningful new knowledge that advances our understanding of ourselves and the world we live in.The CHR proudly promotes the work of our community, which includes exceptional faculty, student, andcollaborative teams.
Alison has also taken up the challenge of expanding Mason’s commitment to community-engaged research bylaunching new communities and projects that represent the best of the (new) Public Humanities. She embodied this work's ethics and practices through her involvement as a PI in these projects. This work has given us new and successful models of co-creation of community-based knowledge and inclusive excellence.
Involved in the creation of the CHR from the outset--since the early planning stages beginning in 2018--Alison assumed the directorship in 2020, intending to serve for three years. Due to the enormous challenges of her first year, which coincided with the peak of the pandemic, she graciously took on an extra year as director, at the request of the CHR Steering Committee. The CHR has been lucky to benefit from her leadership for this extended period, and will continue to do so through this summer.
I hope you’ll join us on April 18 as we raise our cups to toast Alison’s impressive tenure as director. And please also enjoy this opportunity to meet incoming CHR Director Alok Yadav (Associate Professor, English), who will take the helm of the CHR beginning in fall 2024. 
We hope to see you there.
If you're unable to join us in person, please consider sharing some words of gratitude or your favorite CHR memory via this online form. We will share these with Alison at the gathering.
Catherine Olien (Associate Director)
Kristofer Stinson (Graduate Research Assistant)
Center for Humanities Research
March 29, 2024