Dear public humanities colleagues,
This is a transitional summer for MARCH. I’m pleased to share with you the news of the appointment of our next director, Dr. Jillian Sayre, Associate Professor of English at Rutgers-Camden. Her appointment is effective July 1, and we will work together on transitions over the summer. This long-planned change in leadership will allow me to retire from the Rutgers faculty next year.
Jillian Sayre brings to the position wide-ranging interests in public humanities and publishing, and her vision for MARCH includes exciting initiatives in the field of environmental humanities. You will hear more about new projects and opportunities in the months ahead. Sayre is the author of Mourning the Nation to Come, a comparative study of early national romances in North and South America, which was published in 2019 by Louisiana State University Press. Her current research includes religion and ecology in the long nineteenth century as well as contemporary Native American literature. Her scholarship also focuses on narrative theory, affect, and community in American literatures, and she teaches early national American literature, literary theory, and popular literary genres. Her engagement with public humanities includes a community-engaged zines project, supported by a MARCH public humanities faculty fellowship in 2021.
Sayre will be the third director of MARCH since its founding as part of the regional humanities center initiative of the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1999-2000. The founding director at Rutgers-Camden, Howard Gillette Jr., established MARCH as an important bridge between academic and public humanities communities in the region. During its first decade, MARCH engaged with issues of regional collaboration, economic development through heritage tourism, industrial heritage, and training for teachers and the next generation of public humanities professionals.
With that ambitious and inspiring foundation, I became director in 2010 as Howard Gillette retired. Since that time, MARCH has evolved into a public humanities co-working center with multiple projects that serve the region while fostering experiential learning, professional development, and continuing education. Signature projects have included The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia, Learning From Cooper Street, and a continuing education certificate program in historic preservation. MARCH was honored with a Rutgers-Camden Chancellor’s Award for Diversity, Inclusion, and Civic Engagement in 2022, and we were pleased to receive this year’s Preservation Education Award from the Preservation Alliance for Greater Philadelphia.
Please join me in welcoming Jillian Sayre as the next director of MARCH!
Charlene Mires
Professor of History, Rutgers-Camden
MARCH Director, July 2010-June 2023