The Hall Family Foundation has given $500,000 to endow the directorship of the Hall Center for the Humanities at Kansas University, KU announced Wednesday. The permanently endowed fund will provide support for salary, travel and advancement of the directorship.

The center’s current director, Victor Bailey, said in a news release from KU that he knew of no other humanities center with an endowed directorship and that the gift would ensure the Hall Center continued to attract “the caliber of leadership it deserves.”

The Hall Center may be best known by the public for bringing high-profile speakers to town through its Humanities Lecture Series — Pulitzer Prize-winning author Junot Díaz was the most recent, with CNN senior legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin coming in April.

The center’s overarching mission is to stimulate and support research in the humanities, arts and social sciences, especially of an interdisciplinary kind, according to the university. The center brings together faculty and graduate students from various disciplines to build on ideas and share their knowledge within the university and with the wider community.