Dear Colleagues:
After over a decade of visionary leadership and lasting impact, Professor Antoinette Burton has decided to step down after completing her second five-year term as director of the Humanities Research Institute (HRI), effective August 15, 2026. A campuswide search to fill the position is underway. While the transition of highly effective leaders can be unsettling, I am reassured by the incredible legacy that Antoinette has nurtured at HRI and built for humanities scholars across the university. Given such a strong platform at HRI, I strongly encourage those who have interest in leadership in the Humanities and beyond to apply.
Antoinette’s role in transforming the university’s research ecosystem cannot be overstated. Most profoundly, she oversaw the move of the decades-old Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (LAS) to a campus-reporting unit with official IBHE institute status. Following the renaming to Humanities Research Institute in 2020, Antoinette’s first priority with the new institute budget was to more than double graduate fellowship stipends, which she achieved shortly thereafter. Her accomplishments during over ten years of leadership and service to the institute and Illinois are many and varied.
Antoinette secured significant external support to broaden and elevate HRI activities. In 2018 she was awarded funding from the Mellon Foundation for the Odyssey Project, which offers free humanities courses from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign courses to income-eligible adults in East Central Illinois. With this shift, Odyssey moved from a Bard-Clemente course to a U. of I.-based adult education pathway offering LAS credits.
Additionally, signature programs include:
- The Year of Creative Writers/Festival of Writers;
- Training in Digital Methods for Humanists;
- The Mellon Interseminars Initiative award to support innovation in interdisciplinary, graduate education through co-teaching and intentional pedagogy;
- The implementation of a Mellon award to study Emerging Areas in the Humanities, supporting the study of the Biohumanities, Environmental Humanities, and Legal Humanities; and
- The first-ever Humanities Open House, in collaboration with LAS and the University Library, which brought faculty, staff, and students together for hands-on experiences in what the humanities at Illinois does.
Antoinette has been equally and deeply committed to developing and promoting community-engaged research. She forged collaborations to develop and launch community research-based undergraduate courses, co-created internship opportunities with WeCU, and strengthened partnerships with community leaders and organizations, including through the sponsorship of a Community Speaker Series.
As HRI Director, Antoinette worked tirelessly to raise the profile of the humanities not just at Illinois, but across the state and the nation. She is a member of the Illinois Humanities Board, currently chairs the University of Illinois Press Faculty Advisory Board, and previously served on the state Higher Education in Prison Committee.
Antoinette will leave an exceptional legacy, and we are deeply grateful for her vision to transform HRI into a center of interdisciplinary, collaborative humanities scholarship and practice that encompasses faculty opportunity, student learning, and community engagement. As she prepares to return to her full-time faculty role in August 2026, I am grateful for her many years of service to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. I also look forward to working with the Humanities community on campus to identify her successor.
Sincerely,
Susan A. Martinis
Senior Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation
Stephen G. Sligar Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology
Professor of Biochemistry