Sara Wills

Background

About Sara Wills

I have facilitated and enabled initiatives in community engagement in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne for over a decade and am now building a University-wide portfolio focused on civic and community engagement, partnerships for transformational benefit and place-based service learning and contribution. I see the University as a foundational and anchor institution, and my work emphasises its capacity and mission to create public benefit for the communities we serve. As a Professor in Public Humanities and Director of the Melbourne Public Humanities Initiative, I am particularly focused on the humanities making meaning in the public square and preparing students for public good. I also serve as a member of the Engagement Australia Board of Directors and Deputy Editor of Transform: The Journal of Engaged Scholarship. I'm a founding member of the Melbourne Humanities Foundation Board and am involved with a number of Melbourne cultural institutions in various capacities. I am encouraged and inspired by the way in which universities can enhance their work in partnership – with community organisations, civic institutions, NGOs, corporates and generous philanthropic individuals and foundations. My research interests include the transformational processes of university-community engagement, the role of humanities and their potential to create shared meaning and a sense of common purpose, the impact of migration and multiculturalism and place-based engagement and impact. Across a now 20+ career in universities, with sojourns into publishing, museums and other cultural institutions, I see myself as a bridge-builder, enabler, translator and connector of people, ideas and resources, focused on harnessing the power of different communities to achieve mutually beneficial outcomes. I have been personally transformed by my experiences as a migrant and migration studies scholar, by learning from students, partners and wonderful teams of colleagues, by becoming part of a large and creatively unruly Indigenous family, and by the ethics of care and understanding of the lives of others that reading as much as possible enables.