Elias Named Distinguished Professor in Humanities
Amy J. Elias, Chancellor’s professor in the UT Department of English and director of the Denbo Center for Humanities & the Arts, has been named a Distinguished Professor in Humanities. Since joining the University of Tennessee, Knoxville as an associate professor in 2002, Elias has contributed greatly to the study of contemporary literature and humanities institutionalism.
Elias’s research focuses on post-1960s arts and culture, as well as speculative fiction, narrative theory, and humanities OneHealth approaches. She is the principal founder of ASAP: The Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present, an international arts association, and is the founding co-editor-in-chief of its academic journal, ASAP/Journal. This journal won multiple awards from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals and an award from the Association of American Publishers.
In 2026, Elias was awarded the Office of the Provost’s Excellence in Research and Creative Achievement Award, recognizing faculty who have received international recognition. Some of Elias’s recent work includes Speculative Light: The Arts of Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin, a book that grew out of a symposium funded from an NEH Collaborative Research Grant awarded to Elias in 2019. She was awarded another grant, the NEH Connections Grant, in 2021, to design a new curriculum for humanistic computing at UT with two other scholars. Her directorship of the Denbo Center for the Humanities & the Arts has grown the center into an internationally recognized hub of humanities research.
Distinguished Professors in Humanities at UT are faculty recognized for their exceptional contributions to academic excellence, leadership, and their field of study. This achievement realizes the work Elias has done for the humanities and supports the research she will contribute to the field in the future.
by Sloan Docekal