An Institute like ours can only thrive with the trust of its supporters and constituencies. A first, foundational act of trust was bestowed on us twenty years ago, when Ken and Frances Eisenberg endowed our Institute and set it on a path to realize our colleagues’ ambition: a world-class forum for historical research and an inclusive venue where our intellectual commitments could be reinvigorated and shared with the wider world.
I am proud to announce that last year our benefactors confirmed their trust in us with an extraordinarily generous additional $2 million gift. These are not easy times for the humanities, caught between competing priorities and agendas that are not always benevolent. In this challenging landscape, the Eisenbergs' generosity will enable us to expand our work, grounded in scholarly freedom, integrity, and responsibility. For more than two decades, the Institute has been committed to an ethic of service, supporting our colleagues, our graduate and undergraduate students, and the wider community of scholars and citizens around us. This gift prompts us to recommit to that ethic for decades to come.
In that spirit, we are developing two initiatives that will begin to put the new resources to meaningful use. With the cooperation of our colleagues in the Department of History, over the coming academic year we will organize a biennial Eisenberg Conference, bringing together our faculty and external scholars to discuss a theme of broad relevance. We will ensure that this conference is inclusive, participatory, and fully open to the public. In addition, we are establishing an Eisenberg Journalist in Residence program, in cooperation with UM's Wallace House Center for Journalists. Each year, a distinguished journalist will join us for a week during the winter semester, delivering a public lecture, leading a focused workshop with faculty and graduate students, and visiting both undergraduate and graduate classes. These initiatives are only the beginning of the transformative impact this new gift will have on the Institute, the department, and our broader intellectual community. Thanks to the Eisenbergs’ support, we can look to the future with renewed confidence and optimism.
Our community, however, won't have to wait long to see great things from the Eisenberg Institute. Our program for the upcoming academic year offers ample opportunity to understand both the deep past and the present in light of historical reflection. While we have foregone an explicit overarching theme, our roster of speakers will bring a historical lens to issues that are central to our public consciousness. A cluster of speakers will focus on the Middle East today and over the centuries. We will learn about the challenges facing Palestinian scholars and practitioners as they work to preserve their people's history in the face of violence and occupation. We have also invited one of the world's leading experts on the history of maritime trade in the Arabian Peninsula and the Persian Gulf. Other speakers' scholarly interests include the environmental history of the Ottoman Empire, and disability and difference in medieval Mesopotamia. We will welcome historians of the African American experience, of the global political left in the context of decolonization, of urbanism and city life in Africa, and of student activism in modern China. Come take this historically informed tour of the world with us, and don't forget to ask the hard and urgent questions.
