Message from the Director

Welcome to the McGillicuddy Humanities Center! As I begin my first year as director, I am delighted to celebrate the remarkable range of Humanities scholarship, teaching, creative activity, and artistic expression that enriches the University of Maine community every day.

As an archaeologist with joint appointments in Anthropology and the Climate Change Institute, my work examines millennial-scale urbanization and landscape change in the Mediterranean region. I am particularly interested in how landscape histories are encoded within—and continue to shape—the Mediterranean city of the 21^st century.

The annual theme of the 2026–2027 McGillicuddy Humanities Center Symposium is “Memory.” We invite scholars, artists, practitioners, and students from across the humanities, social sciences, and beyond to explore memory and its connections to culture, knowledge, and the human experience. Throughout the academic year, the Symposium will encompass presentations, performances, exhibits, workshops, class visits, and other activities that consider memory not simply as a subject of study, but as a shared process through which communities, identities, and understandings of the past and present are formed.

I hope this year’s Symposium will create opportunities to explore new ideas, make unexpected connections, and consider how the past lives with us in the present. Have an idea? Let’s talk!

Gregory Zaro

Director, McGillicuddy Humanities Center

Professor of Anthropology and Climate Change