The Institute for the Arts and Humanities Advisory Board has created a new faculty fellowship to honor Director John McGowan, who will step down from that post June 30 after serving for eight years.
Current and former board members created the John McGowan Fellowship as a lasting tribute and reminder of McGowan’s mentoring spirit and thoughtful, skilled leadership.
“John has guided the IAH through a period of tremendous growth,” said IAH Advisory Board Chairman Julia Sprunt Grumbles. “By defining the IAH as a full-service faculty center, he has worked tirelessly to support the Institute’s mission to recruit, retain and refresh a world-class faculty of teachers and scholars at UNC.”
During McGowan’s tenure, the IAH has raised more than $12 million to support programs that support UNC faculty. The Faculty Fellows program expanded to add a Chairs Leadership Program and Faculty Learning Community. McGowan created the Innovation Fund to provide faculty with project funding for entrepreneurial, publicly engaged and cutting-edge projects in the arts and humanities.
He was instrumental in securing a $1.4 million Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to create a Digital Humanities Initiative and another $115,000 grant from Mellon for a new Medical Humanities initiative.
McGowan has also seeded university-wide, interdisciplinary collaborations in pedagogy, the curriculum and the performing arts through his support of the campus-wide Rite of Spring at 100 initiative during the 2012-2013 academic year and the World War I Centenary Project planned for 2014-2015.
An award-winning teacher, McGowan will resume his full-time teaching position in the department of English and comparative literature. Music department chair and professor Mark Katz will become IAH director July 1.