New Fox Center director appointed
May 14, 2026
Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of English Benjamin Reiss will become the next director of the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry (FCHI) starting this month. He succeeds Carla Freeman, who will return to her faculty position as the Goodrich C. White Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies following three years of service as FCHI director.
FCHI in Emory College of Arts and Sciences is the focal point for humanities endeavors at Emory University and serves to advance research, teaching, public engagement and programming across all humanistic fields.
“We are grateful to Professor Freeman for her dynamic leadership and renewal of the Fox Center’s mission, scholarship and programming, and we look forward to supporting Professor Reiss as he continues to strengthen the Fox Center as a hub for humanities research, collaboration and public engagement,” says Joe Crespino, interim dean of Emory College.
Reiss, an award-winning scholar of American literary and cultural history, specializes in 19th-century American literature, disability studies, health humanities and public humanities. He was appointed to the Fox Center role last fall by former Emory College Dean Barbara Krauthamer and will begin his term starting May 15.
A former Guggenheim Fellow, Reiss’s scholarship has been supported by the Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. A two-term chair of the Department of English, Reiss co-directed the Mellon Graduate Teaching Fellows program, the Disability Studies Initiative, and the Mellon-funded Public Humanities initiative.
He currently serves as co-principal investigator on a Teagle Foundation grant supporting the “Asking the Big Questions” initiative, which brings faculty together to design transformative first-year seminar experiences. He is the author of numerous books, most recently “Wild Nights: How Taming Sleep Created Our Restless World.”
Freeman, an internationally renowned cultural anthropologist and interdisciplinary feminist scholar of labor, gender and globalization, was appointed to her role in 2023 after serving Emory College in multiple leadership roles, including interim dean, executive associate dean and dean of faculty since 2014.
In her three years as director, she created new faculty research initiatives and anchored the Fox Center’s fellowships and public events around an annual theme (Democracy, Life/Story and Habitat), highlighting the importance of the interdisciplinary humanities for the entire campus.
She also expanded undergraduate honors research opportunities in the humanities through an innovative new curriculum. The success of these efforts is reflected in record applications to the Fox Center’s fellowships, which support researchers at all levels. Through a partnership with the University Research Committee, junior professors became eligible to join the yearlong research seminar for the first time, and Freeman instituted a Visiting Faculty Fellowship for scholars at Atlanta-area institutions.
Under Freeman’s tenure, the Fox Center greatly expanded engagement and participation by the Emory and Atlanta communities through major public events, including Keyword seminars and lectures, a new faculty book launch series, and the return of the prestigious Richard Ellmann Lectures in Modern Literature. The 2026 Ellmann Lectures brought acclaimed author Min Jin Lee to campus for three days of sold-out events, including a conversation with bestselling novelist and Emory creative writing professor Tayari Jones.
