Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry (FCHI)

The Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry (FCHI) is Emory University's hub for the Humanities, advancing research, writing, and creative works among faculty research fellows, postdoctoral fellows, PhD completion fellows, and undergraduate honors research fellows. The Center convenes scholars across a wide range of disciplines, methods, and modes of creative practice, fostering individual and collaborative research as well as public engagement. We are dedicated to rigorous humanistic inquiry and an engaged intellectual community which reaches beyond the walls of the Center.

The Digital Publishing in the Humanities initiative, funded by the Emory College Office of Faculty and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, is housed at the Fox Center. This initiative amplifies humanistic research through support for the open access publication of new monographs and events that bring authors into meaningful conversations with their audiences.

Each year the Center anchors its programming and recruitment of Fellows around a central theme. For academic year 2024-25, our theme is Democracy: Past, Present, Future.

What We Do

The FCHI is a focal point for humanities endeavors at Emory University and serves to advance research and teaching, overall, in the humanities. The FCHI serves both those trained in the humanities and also others in the University who are interested in humanistic issues. The FCHI is dedicated to providing occasions and spaces for encouraging intellectual community and scholarship across disciplines.

In addition to offering broad general support to those engaged in humanistic research across the University, the FCHI runs an annual residential Fellows program to support immersive, long form humanistic scholarship. The Fellows Program welcomes Senior Fellows from Emory's tenured faculty and faculty visiting from Atlanta area institutions, Emory Undergraduate Honors Fellows and Dissertation Completion Fellows, as well as Post-Doctoral Fellows selected from other institutions.  Fellows enjoy an academic year of research and scholarship, intellectual engagement and programs focused on the annual theme. FCHI Fellows take active roles in the life of the Fox Center and in the intellectual life of the larger University. The Fox Center is a hub for the development of novel methodologies, digital scholarship and publishing, and innovative interdisciplinary approaches to humanistic work and public engagement. 

Our History

Sparked by grassroots advocacy of Emory faculty, the Fox Center was founded in Fall 2000 by the College and Graduate School Deans. The originators envisioned a Center that promotes individual research, while also increasing the impact of the humanities across the University and ultimately on Atlanta, the region, and the nation. 

The FCHI is named in honor of the late Bill Fox '79G and Carol Fox, in tribute to their long and devoted service to Emory University and to its students, faculty, administration, and alumni. As a couple, the Foxes' deep intellectual and personal commitments to the fundamental role of the humanities in education, both at Emory and in the larger communities it serves, are reflected in the mission of the Center, which supports all those who believe that the humanities offer compelling guidance in the lifelong quest for meaning by the creative intellect, the moral imagination, and the human spirit.