Penn Center and UGA’s Willson Center Advance Longstanding Partnership with New Mellon Foundation Grant

The Penn Center’s work has always been rooted in place. For more than 160 years, this land on St. Helena Island has been a site of education, cultural preservation, and community-led visioning for the future of the Sea Islands. A new $1 million grant from the Mellon Foundation ensures that work will continue and grow through the second phase of Penn Center’s public humanities partnership with the University of Georgia’s Willson Center for Humanities and Arts.

The grant supports the next chapter of Culture and Community at the Penn Center National Historic Landmark District, an initiative launched in 2021 that brings together scholars, artists, students, and community members to engage Gullah Geechee history and culture as living knowledge. Rather than treating Penn Center as a subject of study alone, the partnership centers the site as a place of shared learning, creativity, and exchange.

Dr. Robert L. Adams, executive director of Penn Center, emphasized the broader meaning of the award for both the institution and the region.

“We are delighted that the Mellon Foundation’s support for the Penn Center’s collaboration with UGA’s Willson Center highlights the importance of our shared efforts,” Adams said. “This grant affirms the value of our work and encourages us to continue translating our overlapping histories into a brighter future for the region. Our partnership offers an excellent opportunity for students, faculty, and community members to experience the diversity of the humanities through the lens of Gullah Geechee culture and history.”

Why This Matters for Penn Center and the Sea Islands

This second phase of funding is significant not only for its scale, but for what it makes possible. The partnership invests directly in programs that connect Penn Center’s historic mission to present-day questions facing the Sea Islands, including land stewardship, cultural continuity, environmental change, and intergenerational knowledge sharing. It also reinforces Penn Center’s role as a convening space where local voices shape how history is interpreted and shared.

Since programming began in 2022, the initiative has supported annual artists-in-residence and community fellows, twice-yearly community conversations, and summer research residencies. These residencies bring students and faculty from institutions such as the University of Georgia, Georgia Tech, Emory University, Howard University, Spelman College, Morehouse College, the University of Michigan, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to St. Helena Island. For many participants, their time at Penn Center offers a first opportunity to learn directly from Gullah Geechee communities and to understand the Sea Islands as a place of ongoing cultural production, not simply historical memory.

“This collaboration has enabled students to learn how the history and culture of Gullah Geechee communities, which trace to West Africa, can inform how we may collectively resolve national concerns from climate change to land preservation,” said Barbara McCaskill, Distinguished Research Professor of English and associate academic director of the Willson Center.

Deepening Community-Centered Work

The new phase of the project focuses on strengthening capacity and long-term sustainability. Angela Dore, who has coordinated the project’s activities at Penn Center since the partnership began, will continue and expand her role, ensuring that programs remain grounded in local relationships and community priorities.

The project’s principal investigators are Nicholas Allen, director of the Willson Center, and Barbara McCaskill, in collaboration with Valerie Babb, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities at Emory University.

“Especially in difficult times, programs like this remind us that our histories are shared,” Babb said. “When we remember this, we remember our humanity.”

Allen noted that the award extends the Willson Center’s long relationship with the Mellon Foundation and carries a responsibility to use the humanities as a tool for public good. “We recognize the responsibility we have to work through the humanities and arts to build curiosity, inclusivity, and opportunity,” he said.

Future programming will also connect Penn Center with other Mellon-funded projects focused on Gullah Geechee foodways, cemeteries, history, memory, and music, expanding creative and scholarly exchange across the U.S., the Caribbean, and the African Diaspora.

A Continuing Commitment

For Penn Center, this renewed investment affirms the national significance of work that begins locally. By centering St. Helena Island and the Sea Islands as places of knowledge, leadership, and creativity, the partnership helps ensure that Gullah Geechee history continues to inform how we understand community, resilience, and shared futures.

If you want, I can tighten this further for web reading, add a short “About the Partnership” box at the end, or adjust the balance to lean even more toward Penn Center’s institutional voice.

For more info visit: https://penncenter.uga.edu/