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25 MUSE Makers
The current director joined the staff in 2000 and has been part of major milestones in MUSE’s history. In 2020, she’s keeping her eye on the future while navigating MUSE’s response to the global pandemic.
“As we started making big plans for 2020 (in those pre-COVID days that are increasingly hard to recall), we saw this year’s 25th anniversary of Project MUSE as a unique opportunity to gather friends and constituents at special events, to express our gratitude to the community that energetically supported a non-profit effort to bring Humanities to the digital space and to the world, and to begin a year-long conversation that would to help define MUSE’s future. We were excited; we were ready; we had caterers.
“And, like the best that laid plans of everyone everywhere, everything changed as 2020 turned into the year of global pandemic, with widespread threats to health and safety in general, and unprecedented disruptions to the mission, operations, and finances of the academic community in particular.
“While this has not in any way been the year we imagined and planned for, we’ve experienced 2020 as an extraordinary opportunity to witness and participate in meaningful responses to the challenges posed by the pandemic. Our staff quickly assembled and opened a special “MUSE in Focus” collection of scholarship relevant to the pandemic. MUSE publishers decided to make a huge amount of content temporarily free to access and use worldwide as teachers and students finished the work of the spring 2020 semester remotely.
“It turned out that the very idea of MUSE—our amazing publishing partners, the extraordinary staff we’ve assembled, the infrastructure, resources, and expertise we’ve built over 25 years—made us uniquely positioned to help as COVID disrupted in person instruction and we all became citizens of the virtual, global community where MUSE has thrived.
“At some point, certainly, we’ll meet again in person to toast MUSE’s 25th (or 26th!). In the meantime, we’ll be grateful for 2020’s powerful reminders of the resilience, purpose, and utility of what our community has built together. And in that spirit, we cordially invite you to browse this 25th Anniversary website, where treasured friends and colleagues help us tell MUSE’s wonderful story of 25 years of service and achievement.”
