William “Bill” Friday was a nationally recognized educator who served as the head of the University of North Carolina system from 1956 to 1986. Friday remained an influential voice in North Carolina after retiring from UNC, serving as host of North Carolina People, a talk show on the UNC-TV public television network, which he began while still president of the UNC system.
Friday’s involvement with the Center began before its founding as one of the leaders (along with Archie Davis) who were instrumental in bringing the Center to North Carolina. Friday served on the Center’s board of trustees starting in the mid-1970s and helped guide it through its tender early years. He was elected chairman of the board in 1987 when he retired as president of the UNC system. He was made an emeritus trustee when he stepped down from that role in 1988.
The William C. and Ida Friday Senior fellowship was endowed by numerous generous donors and has been awarded annually to a senior humanities scholar since 2001.
| 2001–2002 | Patricia Ann Sullivan | Harvard University | Struggle toward Freedom: A History of the NAACP |
| 2002–2003 | John Kucich | University of Michigan, Ann Arbor | Melancholy Magic: Masochism and Late Victorian Political Identities |
| 2003–2004 | David Ringrose | University of California, San Diego | Europeans in the World, 1400–1650 |
| 2004–2005 | Rex Martin | University of Kansas | Rawls on Economic Justice |
| 2005–2006 | Mary Kinzie | Northwestern University | The Poems I am Not Writing: A Meditation in Verse |
| 2006–2007 | Alice Kessler-Harris | Columbia University | A Biography of Lillian Hellman |
| 2007–2008 | Amelie Rorty | Harvard University | On the Other Hand: The Ethics of Ambivalence |
| 2008–2009 | Robert DuPlessis | Swarthmore College | Atlantic Stuff: Histories of Consumption in the Early Modern South Atlantic World |
| 2009–2010 | Dorit Bar-On | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill | Expression, Action, and Meaning |
| 2010–2011 | Peter Railton | University of Michigan, Ann Arbor | Toward a Unified Theory of Rationality in Belief, Desire, and Action |
| 2011–2012 | James Van Cleve | University of Southern California | Problems from Reid |
| 2012–2013 | Susan R. Wolf | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill | Values and Well-Being |
| 2013–2014 | Martha S. Jones | University of Michigan, Ann Arbor | Overturning Dred Scott: Race, Rights and Citizenship in Antebellum America |
| 2014–2015 | Nan E. Woodruff | Pennsylvania State University | Legacies of Everyday Struggle: History, Memory, Trauma in the Contemporary South |
| 2015–2016 | Reinhard Bernbeck | Freie Universität Berlin | Material Traces of Nazi Terror: Reflections on History, Experience, and Memory |
| 2016–2017 | Laurent Dubois | Duke University | Katherine Dunham: An Afro-Atlantic Itinerary |
| 2017–2018 | John H. Smith | University of California, Irvine | How Infinity Came to be at Home in the World: Metaphors and Paradoxes of Mathematics in German Thought, 1675–1830 |
| 2018–2019 | Matthew J. Smith | University of the West Indies | Onward Forward: A Social History of Jamaican Music, 1950–1980 |
| 2019–2020 | Marianne Constable | University of California, Berkeley | Chicago Husband-Killing and the New Unwritten Law |
| 2020–2021 | Keith D. Miller | Arizona State University | Who Wrote The Autobiography of Malcolm X? |
| 2021–2022 | Jane F. Thrailkill | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill | The Agony of Empathy: A Health Humanities Intervention |
| 2022–2023 | Mariska Leunissen | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill | Facts, Evidence, and Observation: Aristotle’s Natural Scientific Study of Women and Motherhood |
| 2023–2024 | Wanda S. Pillow | The University of Utah | Troubling Intimacies: Sacajawea and York as National Subjects |
| 2024–2025 | David J. Vázquez | American University | Days of Futures Past: Latinx Science Fiction and Speculative Futurity |