Directory

The Denbo Center prides itself on a staff who are committed to promoting humanistic inquiry in its many forms. The center’s faculty director works closely with the faculty associate director and the center’s office coordinator to coordinate the center’s programs and research agendas. Affiliated staff from the Office of Research, Innovation, and Economic Development (ORIED) and UT Libraries provide further research-related support, while UT’s College of Arts & Sciences financial team helps manage the administrative needs of the center.

Amy J. Elias

Director, UT Humanities Center and Chancellor’s Professor and Distinguished Professor of English

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Amy J. Elias is UT Chancellor’s Professor and Distinguished Professor of English and since 2017 has served as Director of the Denbo Center for Humanities & the Arts (formerly the UT Humanities Center). She earned tenure at the University of Alabama at Birmingham before coming to UTK in 2002.

Elias is the author of Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s Fiction (Johns Hopkins, 2001), winner of the George and Barbara Perkins Book Prize from the International Society for the Study of Narrative. She is also co-editor of The Planetary Turn: Relationality and Geoaesthetics in the Twenty-First Century (Northwestern, 2015), co-editor of Time: A Vocabulary of the Present (NYU Press, 2016), and editor of the forthcoming Speculative Light: The Arts of Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin (Duke, forthcoming) and authored more than 35 articles and book chapters. She was principal founder of ASAP: The Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present and the founding co-editor-in-chief of ASAP/Journal (Johns Hopkins UP). She is completing a book about speculative forms of dialogue emerging from anthropocene, decolonial, and digital environments and is beginning work on energy humanities studies.

Katharine A. (Katie) Burnett

Associate Director of Transdisciplinary Programs

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Burnett joined the Denbo Center in 2025 as our full-time Associate Director. Her research has focused on 19th-century literature, literature of the U.S. South, and literary representations of enslavement. She is the author of Cavaliers and Economists: Global Capitalism and the Development of Southern Literature, 1820-1860 (LSU Press, 2019) and the co-editor of The Tacky South (LSU Press, 2022) and the Routledge Companion to Literature of the U.S. South (Routledge Press, 2023). Her work has appeared in the Cambridge History of the Literature of the U.S. South, the essay collection Southern Comforts, PMLA, College Literature, and the Southern Literary Journal (later south). She served as associate professor of English and the chair of the Arts and Languages Department and coordinator of the English and Gender Studies programs at Fisk University in Nashville, TN until 2025.