William D. Adams, chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), will visit Delaware from Sept. 6-8, meeting with faculty, students and administrators of cultural heritage organizations throughout the state and giving a public talk at the University of Delaware.

Adams will speak at 2:30 p.m., Wednesday, Sept. 7, in Gore Recital Hall of the Roselle Center for the Arts on UD’s Newark campus. His talk, “The Common Good: The NEH at 50,” is free and open to the public and will include a question-and-answer session.

The talk is part of the UD Thought Leader Speaker Series and is co-sponsored by the College of Arts and Sciences’ Interdisciplinary Humanities Research Center.

Later on Sept. 7, Adams will give brief remarks at the University’s opening reception for “First Folio! The Book that Gave Us Shakespeare,” a touring exhibition supported by the NEH. The reception will be held from 5-7 p.m. in UD’s Old College Gallery.

During his three-day visit, Adams will meet with the leadership of institutions and cultural heritage organizations in Delaware that have benefited from NEH support. The endowment, an independent federal agency created in 1965, is one of the largest funders of humanities scholarship and public programming in the United States.

At UD, Adams plans to meet with the Colored Conventions Project team and with faculty and administrators in the departments of Art History, Black American Studies, English and History and the Interdisciplinary Humanities Research Center, in connection with the NEH’s “Next Generation PhD” initiative to broaden career preparation for humanities doctoral students.

He also expects to visit with Fulbright Scholars and NEH grant recipients at the University and to tour the art conservation laboratories at Winterthur Museum, where he will meet with teams involved in NEH-supported projects there.

Adams will visit Delaware State University (DSU) the morning of Sept. 7, touring the campus and speaking with humanities faculty and graduate students on “The Historical Meaning of Historically Black Colleges and Universities in the 21st Century, Social Justice and the Common Good.”

He will also have opportunities to meet with the leadership of the Delaware Historical Society, the Delaware Humanities Forum and Hagley Museum and Library on this visit to the state.

“The UD community looks forward to welcoming Chairman Adams to the University and celebrating with him both the ‘First Folio!’ exhibition opening and the 50th anniversary of the NEH,” UD President Dennis Assanis said. “The University and the state of Delaware have benefited tremendously from the NEH’s support and visionary leadership.”

About Adams and the NEH

Adams, who was president of Colby College from 2000 until his retirement in 2014, is the 10th chairman of the NEH and a committed advocate for liberal arts education.

He is known as “Bro,” a nickname given by his father in honor of a friend who died in World War II.

He earned his undergraduate degree in philosophy at Colorado College and a doctorate from the University of California at Santa Cruz History of Consciousness program. He studied in France as a Fulbright Scholar and is an Army veteran who served a year in Vietnam.

Writing in the NEH magazine Humanities last year, Adams said:

“Over the last five decades, NEH has made roughly 63,000 grants, totaling $5.3 billion, and leveraging an additional $2.5 billion in matching grants. This impressive stream of funding has supported some 29,000 research fellowships for humanities scholars; roughly 1,900 film, television, and radio documentaries; 5,280 grants for the preservation of humanities materials, collections, and resources; more than 4,000 seminars and institutes for nearly 85,000 college faculty and high school teachers; and hundreds of challenge grants to museums, libraries, historical sites, and colleges and universities in every part of the country.

“But the raw numbers don’t reveal much about the fundamental character and direction of NEH’s programs or about their impact on the country. In studying the agency’s history, I’ve been struck by the Endowment’s impressively broad reach and influence in every sphere it touches, as well as by the concomitant growth of the humanities infrastructure in the United States.”

In Delaware, recent NEH grants have supported a wide range of programs, including major funding for the Delaware Humanities Forum, Hagley and Winterthur museums, UD and DSU. Smaller grants have supported initiatives at such organizations as the state Public Archives and Division of Libraries, Old Swedes Church Foundation, Lewes Public Library and the Delaware Division of Parks and Recreation in Dover.

Grants have funded graduate education and public humanities training institutes at UD and Winterthur, research fellowships, scholarly book projects and the preservation and storage of collections, among many other projects.