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A Proposal Prepared by Marshall C. Eakin, Department of History and Latin American & Iberian Studies Earl E. Fitz, Department of Spanish & Portuguese, Latin American & Iberian Studies, and Comparative Literature Program Thomas A. Gregor, Department of Anthropology and Latin American & Iberian Studies Michael Kreyling, Department of English and American and Southern Studies Lucius Outlaw, Jr., Department of Philosophy and African American Studies 15 March 2001
Rationale: Many universities have centers for international studies or centers for regional studies (Latin America, Europe, Asia, or the Caribbean, for example), but no university has a center for the study of the Americas that brings together a large number of faculty in a wide variety of disciplines at both the graduate and undergraduate levels studying all the regions of the hemisphere. Vanderbilt University should seize the initiative and create such a center. Although primarily based in the College of Arts and Science, the Center would bring together faculty and programs across many schools of the university, notably in Blair, Owen, and Divinity. Vanderbilt University is uniquely situated to emerge at the forefront of comparative studies of the Americas. With already strong programs in American and Southern Studies, Latin American Studies, and African American Studies, we are in a position to develop a truly comparative center for the study of all of the Americas. The Americas (North, Central, South) all share some common historical, economic, social, and cultural roots. Over the past two decades, studies in all academic disciplines have increasingly recognized these common patterns and begun to break down the traditional boundaries of studies of the different regions of the Americas. Clearly, future research on all regions of the Americas will increasingly emphasize comparative thematic and cross-regional studies. This is, and will continue to be, one of the most innovative and dynamic areas in academic research. We propose developing this center around six thematic lines that would provide the center with focus, dynamism, and clear lines of program development:
The Center would serve as a means to attract funds, provide support, and facilitate the connections among faculty and students (graduate and undergraduate) in the many departments and interdisciplinary programs that would form the core for each of these thematic lines. The creation of a Center for the Americas would:
Fundraising and the Capital Campaign
In addition to its powerful intellectual rationale, and the national and international recognition that the Center would bring to Vanderbilt, this proposal offers an attractive opportunity for seeking a major donation to endow the Center for the Americas. Nearly all major area studies centers around the country have attracted a major donor (whose name then goes on the center) who provides a substantial endowment fund (from $5 to 10 million) that then provides a substantial annual operating revenue for programs and activities. We should seize this opportunity to create this center, and to attract a major donor to provide the center with a name and a fund to support it.
Components: (1) Â Peoples of the Americas
The Americas were created out of the collision of three peoples that began with the arrival of Christopher Columbus to the Caribbean in 1492. Before the so-called "Columbian Moment," tens of millions of native peoples of Asiatic origins populated nearly every region of the Americas. The European conquest and colonization of North, Central, and South America began the process of constructing the nation states that define the polities of the region today. From the beginnings of the process of colonization until the mid-nineteenth century, the Europeans brought some 15 million Africans across the Atlantic to work as slaves in the New World. It is the collision, mixing, and struggles of the three peoples that created and shaped the societies and cultures of the Americas. In the twentieth century, the arrival of significant waves of East Asians, South Asians, and peoples from the Middle East have further diversified the ethnic composition of the Americas. The Center for the Americas will study each of these peoples as separate groups, and as part of the enormously diverse mixes that they produce throughout the hemisphere. a.  Native Peoples of the Americas Rationale. The Americas were populated between 50,000 to 11,000 years ago through successive waves of migration from Asia over a land bridge that existed at the time, and possibly by boat across the Bering Straits. By approximately 9,000 years ago the New World was settled from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, with the exception of the Amazon Basin. The Siberian and Asian origins of Native Americans, as well as diffusion of culture within the Americas, has created indigenous cultures that are both remarkably differentiated and also strikingly similar. The differences include socio-economic levels of culture which ranged all the way from complex, and in some cases highly literate civilizations in Mesoamerica (Mexico and Central America) and the Andes, to the hunters and foragers of North and South America. The resemblances (with the exception of the Inuit, who represent the last wave of migration) include physical characteristics and affinities of culture as well. These include shamanistic beliefs, strikingly parallel developments in both North and South America (such as the horse and warrior complex in the American Plains and the Pampas of Argentina), and, to an extent, roughly similar experiences in the tragic history of European conquest, disease, population collapse and subsequent renaissance of new local and pan-Indian ethnic identity. Intellectual Significance. The similar origins and histories of native peoples as ethnic groups justify their appreciation and study, especially since after the original inhabiting of the New World, the Americas were cut off from Europe and Asia. The development of native American cultures is therefore an extraordinary opportunity for comparatively testing theories about adaptation to the environment and the evolution of human society. Further, there are remarkable achievements of native Americans in sciences that ranged from domestication to astronomy, and in architecture, art, literature, poetry and in all other kinds of expressive culture. So rich is the tradition that it forms a critical element in the understanding of human civilization. Moreover, the fullness of native American life ways necessarily engages scholars from the natural sciences, the social sciences and the humanities. It is fitting that the proposed Center incorporate the study of Native Americans within its purview. The symbolic and social importance of Native America. In virtually all of the countries in which they live, native Americans have a special role and identity as part of the nation's origins, patrimony and traditions. Published research and popular studies are highly visible and regularly attract public attention, which should help make the Center activities we propose relatively successful and easy to fund. Beyond this symbolic significance, contemporary native Americans actually make up the majority of the population in Andean countries and throughout highland Mesoamerica. They form significant minorities in the Western United States and cover substantial areas (the Navajo reservation, for example, is the size of the state of West Virginia). In Canada, vast territories are held by increasingly autonomous "First Nations." From these sheer numbers and geography derive all kinds of issues potentially of interest to the Center, including those engendered by ethnicity, economy, politics, health status, and environmental adaptation. The relationship of native Americans with their larger societies is a subject of great importance in itself. "Indian" identity is formed in the context of interaction with the larger societies and has very significant social, psychological and cultural implications. Economic engagement, also of critical importance to the larger societies, varies from virtual wage servitude to participating in extractive ventures (oil, coal, gas, uranium) and even running casinos [an extractive enterprise in its own right!]). Political involvement and confrontation with the larger cultures is highly visible and, in the highland areas of South America and Mesoamerica, crucial to the structure of entire governments. Resources for the Study and Teaching of Native American Culture at Vanderbilt. Vanderbilt already has extraordinary strengths in the indigenous cultures of the Americas. In anthropology all of the faculty members study native American culture in one of three regional areas, including Mesoamerica (archaeology, cultural anthropology, ethnohistory, iconography) the civilizations of the Andes (archaeology and biological anthropology) and indigenous cultures of Amazonia (cultural anthropology). Department members currently conduct excavations of formerly unknown Maya cities (the Petexbatún and Cancuén projects), the lost city of Holmul (an early Maya urban center in northern jungles of Guatemala), the excavation of Ciudad Vieja, El Salvador (one of the earliest and best preserved colonial cities in the New World), the excavation of a major Tiwanaku city (a hitherto largely unknown culture of the Andean highlands), and ethnographic work on the modern Maya, as well as native Amazonian peoples in Rondônia and the Mato Grosso, Brazil. Faculty also edit the journal Ancient Mesoamerica (Cambridge University Press). The department also sub-specializes in native peoples of North America, with research work in southeastern archaeology and the Abenaki Indians of the northeast. Department graduate students take course offerings in North American Indian culture and archaeology. The department also curates the University's major collections of North American artifacts, including the spectacular Thurston Collection, which is, in part, now at the Tennessee State Museum. The Vanderbilt Institute of Mesoamerican Archaeology, a research center at Vanderbilt, is another significant resource for this component of the Center. VIMA uses private donations and grants to support two distinctive enterprises among Native American peoples. These include exploratory archaeological expeditions, subsequent scientific research, and publications in monographs by Vanderbilt University Press. In addition, VIMA fosters community development programs to improve the health and well being of native populations and training and infrastructure for sustainable locally managed eco-tourism projects. VIMA has already brought credit to Vanderbilt through both international publicity in the national press and scholarly publications. Its program of "socially conscious archaeology" has already been recognized and given distinguished awards by the Guatemala Academy of History and Geography and two of Guatemala's National Museums. The departments of Spanish and Portuguese also devote substantial resources to the study and research of topics related to native peoples. Earl Fitz (Spanish & Portuguese) is particularly interested in Native American literature, both pre-Columbian and post-conquest. In the department of Art and Art History, Annabeth Headrick and Vivien Fryd publish and teach in the area of Native America. Headrick teaches courses on both North and Mesoamerican art and does research on iconography in Teotihuacan. Fryd teaches and has published on the image of Native Americans as seen in 19th-century art of the United States. In the History Department, Jane Landers has published on the Yamasee, the Seminoles and Black Seminoles of the Southeast, as well as currently consulting on two archaeological and historical projects in Florida. In the Graduate Department of Religion (and Divinity School), Howard Harrod has for many years published and taught about the cultures and especially the religions of native America. The Nashville community also has resources, including the Tennessee State Division of Archaeology in Nashville and scholars affiliated with the Hermitage. The Association of Southeastern Tribes, which actually includes many tribal affiliations outside of this region, is also located in Nashville and can potentially contribute to and benefit from the Center. Activities. In the course of writing this proposal, we came to see that there is substantial interest in the College faculty in the Native Peoples of the Americas. There are at least sixteen faculty whose work is directly engaged with this topic in at least five different departments and two schools. To a surprising extent, however, the faculty with these interests are not aware of each other's efforts. We see the Center as creating a community for these faculty and their students.
Our long-term goals would be to foster study, teaching and popular understanding of the importance of Native Americans, through such activities as presentations, conferences, visiting lectures and other scholarly activities. In this process, the Center would fund research on topics related to native peoples, and bring Native Americans to the Center to educate our membership and the larger community. b. Â Europeans in the Americas Rationale. The second major group to people the Americas were the Europeans who embarked on the process of conquest and colonization in the late fifteenth century. While the flow of Europeans to Latin America came primarily from Spain and Portugal until the nineteenth century, and in North America and the Caribbean primarily from England and France, peoples from all across the European continent flooded into the Americas in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In addition to the powerful and pervasive influence of Native Americans and Africans in the Americas, the Europeans have left a deep imprint across the region through the creation of new nations born out of European political ideologies, speaking European languages, and worshiping in religions of European (largely Christian) origin. Clearly, no Center for the Americas can ignore the powerful and pervasive influence of the peoples of Europe on the Americas from Canada to Argentina. In the broadest sense, it is the European conquest and process of colonization that provides the most common patterns and heritage across the Americas. The study of the European heritage of the region is a truly transatlantic enterprise. In both cases, scholars must go back to the Old World origins of these peoples and connect those origins with the impact and transformation of these peoples and their descendants in the New World. One cannot understand American literature (as it was traditionally studied) disconnected from English literature. Spanish American and Brazilian literatures are not complete unless one connects them to their roots in Spanish and Portugal. Resources. The resources at Vanderbilt for studying the European heritage in the Americas are enormous. The European Studies program is one of the largest interdisciplinary programs in the College with some forty affiliated faculty crossing many departments and disciplines. The European Studies program, although not directly under the umbrella of the Center, would be a vital partner in its work. James Epstein in the History Department currently edits the Journal of British Studies. The Holocaust Lecture Series is also a major annual event that attracts international attention to Vanderbilt and provides important links to the surrounding community. Beginning next year, the German DAAD will fund a visiting professor for five years who will specialize in teaching European history.
In particular, the strong literature programs in Spanish (Peninsular literature), English (British literature), French, Italian, Germanic and Slavic Languages, would all play a key role in the study of the literatures of the Americas. The History Department has ten historians of Europe including several whose work is transatlantic in scope. The excellent faculty already in place in fine arts, political science, and economics, in particular, would also be essential to any programs or courses on the European heritage of the Americas. c.  Africans in the Americas Rationale. From the beginnings of the European conquest of the Americas in the late fifteenth century until the mid-nineteenth century, the transatlantic slave trade brought some 15 million Africans in chains to the shores of the New World in the largest and longest forced migration in human history. A significant number of free Africans also crossed the Atlantic and played key roles in the process of conquest and colonization. Africans and their descendants have played a central role in the construction and creation of the societies and cultures in the Americas, especially in Brazil, the Caribbean, and the U.S. South. The influence of Africans can be seen across the Americas, and the diaspora of African peoples across the region forms one of the most important influences in the history of the New World. The study of Africans and their descendants in the Americas will form one of the central thematic clusters within the Center for the Americas. African American studies must, like the heritage of Euro-Americans begin with the study of the origins of these peoples in the Old World, more specifically, with Africa. Center activities and programs will study Africans in the Americas through: a) histories of the continent and its peoples; b) geography; c) anthropology and the cultural: arts, religion, philosophy, music, dance; d) society, politics, and economics. Another key focus must be the slave trade across the Atlantic and the creation of new societies in the Americas formed out of the mixture of Africans, Native Americans, and Europeans in the Caribbean, South America, Central America, and North America. Presents and future. As with each of the these major groups, the comparative approach to studying them in an interdisciplinary and collective process will force us to rethink the very nature of the current interdisciplinary programs. We will ask ourselves how are teaching and research on Africans in the Americas to be pursued? By whom? To what ends? We will pursue questions of the social production, organization, institutionalization, legitimization, and distribution of knowledge and art forms produced by African and African-descended peoples in the Americas. Certainly, such matters have been central to the development, institutionalization, and ongoing maintenance of African, African American, and Africana Studies. They will be of no less pertinence within a new Center devoted to studies of the Americas. These issues will form some of the major focal points for our discussions and planning for and actual development of, the Center. Resources. The African American Studies Program includes nearly two dozen faculty in a variety of departments across the College and in several schools. The annual Martin Luther King, Jr. Lecture Series brings international attention to the programs in African American Studies. The strong programs in African American religion in Religious Studies and Divinity (scholars such as Renita Weems, Dennis Dickerson, and Lewis Baldwin) have already developed clusters of faculty. The Kelly Miller Smith Institute has attracted major funding. The current Vanderbilt consortium with Fisk and Meharry provides us with important ways to diversify the curriculum and build connections with the Nashville community. The support staff in African American Studies includes a part-time director and a secretary. The already existing major and minor programs would be strengthened, amplified, and rethought by cooperation with the development of cross-disciplinary courses, seminars, and programming in the Center. As with American and Southern Studies, and Latin American and Iberian Studies, the major and minor would undoubtedly be redefined and rethought through the collaborative ventures created by the Center. (2)  Literatures of the Americas Rationale. The study of the literatures of the Americas is, without doubt, pivotal to this enterprise. The written record of cultures is one very widely shared. For most of its history, the production and study of literature in the United States, for example, has been arranged on an east-west, transatlantic axis. This axis, dominant in anthologies and departmental requirements, has always assumed a culturally English America. The study of American Literature is no longer so secure with such exclusivity in its origins and meanings. The emerging scholarly orientation is now largely hemispheric, north-south, rather than transatlantic--careful not to dismiss the older paradigm, but conscious, too, of its limits. Significant Hispanic, Asian, and African American populations have triggered a revision of the nation's literary history and character as ordained Anglo. Anthologies of American Literature, for example, used to begin with the writings of English colonists and ignored the rest of the continent--until the influence of New England could be detected. Now, Native American creation myths, Spanish cuentos and corridos, Portuguese crônicas, the journals of Cabeza de Vaca and Samuel de Champlain, are part of the mix of voices at the origins of the Literatures of the Americas. And De Soto's route of pillage and slaughter is as significant as the Puritan "errand into the wilderness." Those who seriously intend to reinvent graduate studies in the research university, as Vanderbilt does, must cross the border from traditional departments and disciplines. The traditional model imported from European universities by Johns Hopkins in the nineteenth century has served well. But, like the Oldsmobile, even seemingly permanent fixtures need serious change--if not final retirement. No university can claim participation in the reinvention of graduate education without moving the "home" of its M.A. and Ph.D. beyond traditional academic departments. Cultural studies, generally conceived, and the cultural studies of the Americas more particularly, form the crucible in which new ways of teaching, learning, and research in the humanities and social sciences are begin refined. Vanderbilt, by virtue of its unexploited faculty resources in the borderlands of traditional disciplines, can help to push American higher education into the future. We need the acknowledgment of those resources and, of equal importance, we need a stand-alone, fully-fledged program to sustain collegial interaction, research, and graduate degrees (M.A. and Ph.D.) in fields shaped by the interdisciplinary codes of cultural studies. What we propose under the banner of the Center for the Americas is a richly interwoven set of course offerings encompassing more traditional (i.e. field- and discipline-specific) courses and new courses in the subject matter and methodology of cultural studies. Sometimes this will mean wholly or dramatically innovative modes of thinking about traditional subject matters ("theories" that de-center familiar systems of inquiry and statement). Sometimes our goal will require "odd" or unfamiliar blends of courses and disciplines, more or less erasing the jurisdictions of established departments. Those of us charged with drafting this new proposal for the Center for the Americas believe that in general this new route to the graduate degree is vital to the future of graduate education at Vanderbilt, and in the American academy beyond our property lines, and in particular we believe that research, teaching, and learning in the interwoven aspects of the cultures of the Americas is fertile ground in which to begin. In Comparative Literature, too, the concept of "American" literature is rapidly changing. With steadily increasing interaction between the literature of French and English Canada, the United States, Spanish America, and Brazil, the field of inter-American literary study has emerged as an exciting new area of criticism and scholarship. The director of Vanderbilt's Program in Comparative Literature, Earl Fitz (who has just completed a new book on the development of the novel in Brazil and the United States), is in the vanguard of this change; he created Penn State's doctoral program in inter-American literature and has taught and published in the area for more than twenty years. The Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Vanderbilt already has both graduate and undergraduate programs that require knowledge of both literatures and languages, and its recognized strength in both Spanish American and Brazilian literature will enable it to become a leader in the field of inter-american literary study. Vanderbilt is poised between the phasing out of the older paradigm and recognition of the new. With the participation and cooperation of the departments of English, Spanish and Portuguese, French and Italian, and Comparative Literature as a core bundle rather than unit--and led by interdisciplinary programs in American and Southern Studies, Latin American and Iberian Studies, African American Studies, and Women's Studies, which--though under-supported--have kept the future alive, Vanderbilt is in a position to advance almost immediately among the universities remaking the literary and cultural history of the hemisphere. Resources. Faculty in English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Comparative Literature, and other language and literature departments already comprise a large contingent of more than three dozen scholars with an interest in the literature of the Americas. These departments, and the Comparative Literature program, will form a core for beginning a program in the literatures of the Americas. Our hope is to attract outstanding graduate students who will spend their first year or two at Vanderbilt taking courses that are interdisciplinary and comparative. This will provide them with a solid grounding in the literatures of the Americas before they begin to specialize in their specific, departmentally-based doctoral programs. The graduate fellowships controlled by the Center (see page 22) will attract these graduate students, and their departments to work collaboratively with the Center, its faculty, and programs. It will lead to the production of graduates who will move into the job market in their disciplines, but with a powerful interdisciplinary and comparative training that will make them more attractive to universities hiring recent Ph.D.s. Latino Studies is also creating an interdisciplinary approach, as it allows for a conversation among departments that traditionally did not see each other as having common research interests. It is bringing together diverse departments such as English and Spanish and Portuguese. William Luis, for example, is a leading scholar in the literature of Latinos and holds a double appointment in the Departments of English and Spanish and Portuguese. Courses already on our books virtually cover the emerging field. Many are regularly taught, and therefore need no special scheduling push. Others, taught as individual faculty have elective time in their schedules, would be freed if there were a programmatic impetus. Still others are in the planning stage. Appendix B contains a listing of courses currently offered in the interdisciplinary studies programs that we will bring together in the Center. The list of courses, at times, indicates faculty research interests and, indirectly, a direction for refashioning the B.A. from core through major courses. Almost certainly, one of the major contributions of the Center and its work will be to redefine the nature of the current curriculum in a variety of departments and programs to produce new courses that embody a larger comparative and interdisciplinary approach. We may create an M.A. and certificate programs that will provide students and faculty with a comparative and interdisciplinary training that strengthens the more traditional departmental and disciplinary Ph.D. programs. (3)  Arts and Expressive Culture in the Americas Rationale. The cultures of the Americas do not exist solely in the written and published word. Painting, sculpture, objects made for use or worship, architecture, music, and dance make visibly and objectively palpable the wider cultural assumptions and aspirations of a society by tapping into and distilling its distinguishing ideologies -- e.g. its "knowledge" and "reality." By nature, any work of art is a synthesis of its time and place. This synthesis of time and place is given form and dimension, color and movement, and often the artifact that is produced engages more than one of the traditional five senses in reception and consumption. The visual and expressive arts are inter- and multi-disciplinary by definition. Painting, sculpture, photography, architecture, city planning, furniture, objects made for everyday use, music, and dance also embody, crystallize, and reinforce cultures. The Americas, as the zone of collision where several established sets of cultural practice continue to encounter one another, constitute a rich field of study. The cakewalk, tales of Uncle Remus, jazz and spirituals, rice and beans are only a few of the cultural "texts" where competing systems of meaning negotiate for expression. When we experience dance, a jazz riff, a Hudson River landscape or an abstract expressionist canvas, we experience a form moving through space and time, but we also process this abstraction and/or narrative through our politics, repressed psychic drives, and body language that our particular cultural moment makes available. A work of art in its cultural setting, then, not only happens in history, but IS history; it is not only a work of expressive "freedom" but also of interpretive limits. It possesses powers of agency and purpose that we depend on to instruct and challenge, comfort and delight us about who we are and where we have been as a civilization. The arts and expressive cultures of the Americas have no particular claim to these qualities. All cultures everywhere are entitled to similar claims on meaning. Reflection on the power of the Mesoamerican pyramid to express statehood, the patterned weavings of Andean peoples to evoke kinship structures, the drip paintings of Jackson Pollock to record his/our existential terror, the way carvings by Arctic peoples pay homage to animal prey -- every civilization is a network of myriad systems of communication and reassurance. These systems create and record meanings largely on the sub-semantic level; that is, on the level of the unexamined, perhaps the trivial, the "goes-without-saying." Students looking for the infrastructure of nation and national history have traditionally gone to official documents and public events -- declarations, constitutions, battles, elections -- for the binding agreements and understandings that make national identity. The emergent inter-disciplinary approach of culture studies reveals a prior template or design into which these previously privileged texts fit as parts rather that wholes. In our increasingly visually-oriented culture, awareness of sub-semantic systems of knowledge are vital to the evolving meaning of literacy. It is crucial that Vanderbilt refine its offerings in the allied fields that comprise arts and expressive cultures of the Americas. We must do so for several reasons: awareness of the eclectic ground of American culture and history as a shared enterprise is essential to a true diversity of outlook; an understanding of our culture and its interconnections is and will continue to be the bedrock of research and teaching in the humanities and social sciences; our students are already keenly aware of what it feels like to be conscious in an age when systems of reference and meaning can change with a single keystroke. Resources. The most important resources here are more than two dozen faculty in Art and Art History, Anthropology, English, and the Blair School all with interests in art, film, and music in the Americas. In the Blair School, for example, Gregory Barz studies and teaches on African and African American music; Dale Cockrell and Melanie Lowe are specialists in North American music; and Helena Simonett is an ethnomusicologist specializing in Latin American and Caribbean music. In the Art and Art History Department, Leonard Folgarait, Amy Kirschke, Vivien Fryd, and Annabeth Headrick (to cite a few examples) all work on North American and Latin American art and art history. Many of these faculty have ties to the art galleries and museums in the community. Kirschke, for example, has worked extensively with the Van Vechten Galley at Fisk University. We hope to bring these faculty together through Center Activities to promote graduate and undergraduate study across schools and departments. (4)  Religions of the Americas Rationale. Religion is one of the major forces in the lives of most peoples in the Americas since precolumbian times. The many different Native American religions, the various forms of Christianity introduced with the conquest, the profound influence of African religions, along with Judaism and Islam, have clashed and contended for the hearts and souls of peoples across the Americas. The conquest of the Americas by European powers was ultimately successful in creating a European political order. The European spiritual conquest of the Americas succeeded only imperfectly as African and Native American religious practices and values clashed and blended with various forms of Christianity (the Jesuits and the Puritans, for example). Despite the Catholic religious orthodoxy in Latin America for nearly four centuries, today the region thrives with a diverse array of religions from traditional Catholicism to the Afro-Brazilian candomblé and Haitian vodun. Despite the overwhelming presence of Christianity in North America, elements of Native American spirituality and Asian religions have been persistent and durable. The Americas are an enormous laboratory of religious diversity. We expect this to become an area of special strength for Vanderbilt. Resources. Vanderbilt University and the College of Arts and Science already have significant strengths in the study of religions, not only in the America, but across the globe. Religion would form one of the major thematic foci of the Center for the Americas, and the center would draw on the already strong faculty in the College and the Divinity School to make the interdisciplinary, comparative study of religions in the Americas a major strength of the university. At least two proposals have been generated by the strategic planning process focusing on African American religions and religious studies in general. We must draw on the strong faculty clusters in Religious Studies and Divinity, in addition to other faculty in other departments of the College and other schools. Victor Anderson, Renita Weems, and Forrest Harris (Divinity), Lewis Baldwin, Dennis Dickerson, Francis Dodoo, and Daniel Patte (A&S), to name a few key faculty, already form an important cluster for the study of African American religions. Most of the faculty in the Divinity School and the Department of Religious Studies pursue research and teach on American or European religions. The Divinity School and the Graduate Program in Religion rank among the top ten programs of their kind in the nation. The current proposal to create a "Center for the Study of Religion and Culture" would provide a strong program that could reinforce the programs and activities of the Center for the Americas in this thematic cluster. (5)  Economic and Social Integration of the Americas Rationale. The dynamic forces of economic and social change have become powerful stimuli driving the interest in comparative studies of the Americas not only by academics, but also by politicians, the business community, and policy makers. Rapidly increasing trade within the American nations, the migration of millions of people from Latin America and the Caribbean, and the integration of technology and information networks have convinced nearly everyone that the Americas will eventually become a highly integrated network of societies and economies over the next few decades. The peoples of the Americas have now surpassed 500 million and this forms one of the largest potential markets on the planet. Trade within the Americas has multiplied rapidly over the last decade with the creation of the North American Free Trade Agreement, the common market of South American nations (Mercosur), and the move toward the creation of a single hemispheric trading block by 2010. The illegal market in drugs has linked the hemisphere in intricate and tragic ways. Resources. Vanderbilt University has in place a variety of faculty and programs that have already begun to pursue research on the economic and social integration of the Americas. The internationalization of the Owen School of Management, the longstanding success of the Graduate Program in Economic Development, key faculty in the Economics Department, and select faculty in the social sciences and the Law School can be brought into greater contact with each other to combine our strengths in the study of the economies and societies of the Americas. In particular, we have the opportunity to build on existing strengths in studies of economic and social forces in the U.S. with strong programs in Latin America. The student population of the Owen School is now nearly one-quarter international students with a large contingent from Latin America. The Owen School already has important relationships with two of the finest universities in the two largest economies in Latin America--Brazil and Mexico. Two of the school's Founder's Medalists in the last decade have been Brazilians. A half-dozen Owen graduates teach in the business school of the most prestigious university in Brazil, the Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Executive MBA classes from USP regularly spend a week each semester at Vanderbilt. Owen also has a strong exchange relationship with the most prestigious science and engineering school in Mexico, the Instituto Tecnológica de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey, widely considered to be the M.I.T. of Latin America. Owen has a joint M.A./M.B.A. program with the Center for Latin American and Iberian Studies that has had a regular stream of students over the past five years. The Center and the Owen School are perfectly positioned to apply for multi-year funding as a Center for International Business Education and Research from the U.S. Department of Education. These grants provide funding of more than $250,000 a year over three-year funding cycles. The Graduate Program in Economic Development (GPED) has operated at Vanderbilt for more than forty years and has hundreds of alumni around the globe in powerful positions in government and the private sector. The majority of the students until the 1970s came from Latin America, especially Brazil. James Foster, the current director of the program, is a development economist (who studied under a Nobel Prize winner) with strong ties to government officials and economics programs in Mexico. Along with the CLAIS and faculty in several schools, Foster is actively seeking funding from the United States Agency for International Development, for projects in Latin America and other regions of the globe. (Foster just received a major grant to work with projects in former Soviet republics in Central Asia.) Other development economists, and faculty who study the economy of the U.S., would form the core of a group to develop comparative studies of the economies of the Americas. Given the growing movement--promoted by Republican and Democratic administrations in Washington, D.C.--to create a single hemispheric trading system over the next decade (an American Free Trade Association), focus on the comparative study of the economies of the Americas would place Vanderbilt at the forefront of this movement. A comparative program that combines the strengths of the Owen School, the GPED, and the Department of Economics would help attract excellent graduate and professional students from the United States and the rest of the Americas, helping to internationalize the campus and making us a world-class university. The Center for Latin American and Iberian Studies is about to submit a grant to the U.S. Department of Education that would combine the efforts of Vanderbilt, Emory, and two major universities in Brazil to develop exchange programs of students and faculty. This grant could bring in $200,000 over a four-year period. The Departments of Political Science and Sociology have traditionally had their strongest faculty clusters in the study of U.S. society. The Center for the Americas could build on this traditional strength by bringing faculty who study the U.S. in a more sustained and systematic dialogue with faculty in Latin American Studies. Dan Cornfield (chair of Sociology) edits a major journal, Work and Occupations, that has begun to draw more directly on connections in Latin America. Cornfield speaks Spanish and regularly works with scholars in Latin America. Wayne Santoro, a recent hire in Sociology, works on Latino groups in the U.S. The Center would promote a stronger emphasis on programs and seminars that would produce more comparative research and publications. (6)  Education and Community in the Americas Rationale. The pace of globalization has also begun to transform education practices across the Americas. International trade in education services, for example, is quickly becoming a focus of attention in commercial circles. With the migration of labor, bilingual ‘educational passports' are now used in a dozen border states in Mexico and the U. S. The equivalence of degrees and the certification of professional programs is rapidly becoming an important issue for the increasing number of enterprises engaged in cross border commerce. As students are increasingly trained in both the College of Arts and Science and in Peabody College, the ties among the two faculties will grow and intensify. As the Owen School becomes more internationalized, its programs will increasingly transform the concept of "study abroad." This thematic focus on education and community will bring together faculty and students across departments and schools and help internationalize the campus. The need for more and more innovative English as a Second Language (ESL) teaching has never been more apparent. Initiatives shared by Peabody College and the College of Arts and Science in ESL and diversity education could be refined to collaborate with the proposed Center for the Americas. Resources. Peabody College of Education and Human Development is well positioned to work with and learn from scholars of education policy in Latin America and the Caribbean and Latinos in U.S. schools. In the Department of Leadership and Organizations (DLO), James Guthrie, Director of the Center for Education Policy, concentrates on educational policy issues and resource allocation consequences. Stephen P. Heyneman, a professor of comparative education with over twenty years of experience in education policy reform at the World Bank, is leading international research efforts in education policy. Dr. Heyneman's research agenda includes issues of education as a mechanism for social cohesion, education, commerce, and issues of labor mobility as these pertain to equivalency in education. DLO trains future superintendents of public instruction, future university rectors, future leaders of educational foundation, as local and national authorities in both public and private school systems. The department plays a significant role in U.S. debates over education and has strong international connections. Within the area of Higher Education Administration, John Braxton and Michael McLendon are at the forefront of educational leadership and higher education governance issues The Department of Teaching and Learning specializes in curriculum and instructional leadership and could ably contribute to work regarding educational quality. In addition, Peabody provides sound training of future researchers in the research methods critical to analyzing education systems. Peabody already attracts students at all levels of higher education with interests in education policy, research and teaching who are interested in Latin American and Caribbean education and that of Latinos in the U.S. In sum, Peabody strengths would be further enhanced by the support that the Center for the Americas would allow. Indeed, it is well positioned to contribute to the research and practical work on education development in the region and the knowledge of how the influx of Latinos is changing the dynamic and considerations within U.S. education systems. A comparative program that combines the strengths of the Owen School, the GPED, the College of Arts and Science, and Peabody College of Education and Human Development would help attract excellent graduate and professional students, from the United States and the rest of the Americas, thus helping to internationalize the campus and making us a world-class university. As noted above, the Center for Latin American and Iberian Studies is about to submit a grant to the U.S. Department of Education that would combine the efforts of Vanderbilt, Emory, and two major universities in Brazil to develop exchange programs of students and faculty. This grant could bring in $200,000 over a four-year period. Moreover, the Peabody School is about to submit two applications to FIPSE for exchanges with other university programs in the field of higher education policy. The first program will be for universities in Brazil; the second will be for universities in Mexico.
The Community Research and Action (CRA) doctoral program faculty (Vera Chatman, Joe Cunningham, Paul Dokecki, Craiganne Heflinger, Bob Newbrough, Doug Perkins) in the Department of Human and Organizational Development at Peabody could form the core of an important faculty cluster joining with key faculty in the Medical School and the College of Arts and Science. Together these faculty would focus on "Community in the Americas." They would augment the CRA group with other HOD faculty (e.g., Sharon Shields) and with others from within Peabody (e.g., Steve Heynemann in Department of Leadership and Organizations) and the university (e.g., Leonard Hummel in Divinity) who would also be interested and doing work in the relevant areas. This group would be interested in social integration and social deviance inquiries in a range of village and urban settings involving Anglo, Hispanic, African and Native American cultures. The initial approach would be to take their current research questions and expand them into cross cultural settings, exploring their relevance to general American settings.
Planning and Implementation: Planning Seminar (2001-2002) The first step in the creation of the new Center will be the organization of a year-long seminar that will bring together eight to ten key faculty who will meet once a week through the 2001-2002 academic year. Using the model of the annual faculty seminar at the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities, this group of faculty will read and discuss materials on interamerican studies. They will have two specific philosophical and programmatic objectives: to outline the mission statement of the new Center and its future development, and to develop a concrete working four-year plan for the implementation of programs and activities. This plan would be ready by June 1, 2002.
These faculty members would be carefully selected to represent the diverse interests that will play important roles in the proposed Center. They will receive a course reduction and a research stipend ($4,000) as compensation for the time and energy they will invest in the project. The seminar will also have a fund ($10,000) to be used to bring in visitors from other universities or to bring in consultants to work with the group. Staffing and Relocation Timeline Part of the task of the faculty seminar group will be the development of a timetable for hiring a director and staffing the Center. In particular, the group will develop a job description for the Center's director. The university should then pursue a national search beginning in the summer of 2002 for an outstanding individual who will come to Vanderbilt with a faculty appointment. The new director will then begin the process of assembling the key faculty, programs, and activities. The director will also begin to pursue grant opportunities and work with the development office to identify and pursue fundraising opportunities for the Center.
We believe that the new director would need a full-time administrative assistant to handle the coordination and implementation of the activities of the Center.
Organizational Structure: Physical Space The key to the success of an interdisciplinary center for the study of the Americas is a shared physical space for all its major components. The first step toward intellectual and programmatic exchange is to locate the offices, seminar rooms, and meeting space of the Center's participants in a single building. The ideal location would be the soon to be vacated and renovated Buttrick Hall. The offices of the Center director, program directors, and their staff must be housed together. We cannot continue the old Vanderbilt pattern of isolating interdisciplinary programs in marginal locations around the campus. Buttrick is at the center of the campus and would provide the Center for the Americas with a location worthy of its importance; it would also bring the key components of the Center into a location that would provide for a true meeting ground of students, faculty, and staff.
We also believe that all international and interdisciplinary programs should be housed in the same location to provide the collective and communal support necessary for the development of all of these programs. The Center could serve as a powerful stimulus that would also help strengthen other interdisciplinary programs in the College and international studies across all regions. It would be wise to bring together the operations of international programs such as study abroad, European Studies, and East Asian Studies in the same location to facilitate the growth of international studies at Vanderbilt and coordination among all the area studies programs. Administrative Structure and Staffing
The Center would serve primarily as an umbrella structure to bring together key participants and programs, to channel resources to them, and to promote interdisciplinary and comparative work. A director with an administrative assistant would lead the Center, serve as the key coordinator, and engage in grant writing and fundraising activities. The Center director would be assisted and advised by an executive committee composed of the directors of African American Studies, American and Southern Studies, and Latin American and Iberian Studies, as well as the associate provost in charge of international studies. The composition of this committee would, no doubt, shift in the years ahead as we redefine the nature of those programs and as new programs emerge out of the work of the faculty. Housing the three existing interdisciplinary programs in the same location would allow for greater sharing of resources and program coordination.
Infrastructure Issues: Library
New resources for print an electronic information will be essential for the development of comparative, interdisciplinary programs on the Americas. We envision a library budget assigned to the Center. Departments and programs will apply to the Center for access to these funds to buy materials that are clearly within the interdisciplinary, comparative orientation of Center programs. This library fund would serve as a powerful mechanism to draw departments and programs into close work with the Center. Technology
As with the creation of any new program or center, this one will require the normal information technology (hardware and software) for its offices. We will need assistance with the development of a website and software to link together the faculty, programs, and departments across the university.
Program Initiatives: The program initiatives we describe below form the principal mechanisms that will bring about the collective, collaborative, interdisciplinary work that will be at the core of the Center's mission. These initiatives are instruments for fostering the work of an energized and creative faculty, redesigning graduate and undergraduate programs, and producing outstanding Ph.D.s. Although these programs will require a substantial investment of resources, they will also help the Center attract outstanding scholars, graduate students, grant monies, and a larger endowment.
We also recognize that these programs will be the beginning of an extended process of rethinking the organization and structure of existing interdisciplinary programs. One measure of the success of the Center will be the extent to which programs such as African American Studies, American and Southern Studies, Latin American and Iberian Studies, and Comparative Literature will be reconceptualized in another decade. This will have an important impact on the nature of graduate programs in departments (making them more interdisciplinary and comparative) and on the undergraduate curriculum (through new courses and redesigned interdisciplinary majors). Endowed Chairs The creation of three new endowed chairs will also be essential to the successful growth and development of the Center. If, at Vanderbilt, we could attract the top two or three inter-American scholars to our university, we would immediately propel ourselves to the front rank of this fast developing new field. Given our already existing strength in the requisite, or core fields, there is every reason to think that we would be quite successful in this endeavor. Because of the diverse nature of its intellectual and scholarly activities (our work covers a wide range of departments and disciplines), the Center must, in terms of its organizational structure, be able to select (and therefore balance) the recipients of these endowed chairs. Thus, a Center Executive Committee would, conceivably, select in any given competition, scholars working in the Humanities, the Sciences, the Social Sciences, or in another unit, such as Blair, Owen, or the Law School. The scholars selected as endowed chairs would be expected to teach seminars on a regular basis, to interact with students (and, serving on doctoral committees, serve as mentors to them), and to give at least two public lectures per year. The Center would have control over these chairs and with each successive vacancy in them, would decide where to best locate them to maximize the synergies among the programs. Examples of key intellectual areas that we envision as central to the work of the Center are studies of slavery, borderlands and frontiers, inter-American literature, and indigenous literatures. Key chair appointments in any of these areas would bring in faculty who would have an impact that would provide powerful cross-departmental and cross-school connections.
Using an estimate of $2.5 million to endow a chair, this would require $7.5 million in endowed funds for the creation of three chairs. Special Conference Series The Center would have a budget for academic conferences that would be international in scope and would be annual or bi-annual in scheduling. Funds would be set aside to invite outside participants representing new and established trends in inter-American scholarship. Since many of these individuals would presumably teach at universities abroad, an endowment could be sought to defray all or part of the expenses. Planning and administering the conferences could be shared by staff and graduate students associate with the Center. The format of the conferences would be the familiar Thursday-Saturday schedule. We could consider a date that coincided with an alumni function or with the week between the end of exams and commencement in order to open the traditional borders of the meeting. These annual conferences would serve as one of the most important vehicles for bringing national and international attention to Vanderbilt and the College of Arts and Science.
Special arrangements would be made to include a local component. Metro and private school teachers and administrators would be urged to attend Center faculty and graduate student workshop sessions that would explore ways to add Center approaches to K-12 classrooms. Stipends could be offered to enhance the invitation. We estimate that the cost of this annual seminar will be around $25,000 to bring in speakers from the United States and abroad. Regular Seminars The ongoing success and viability of a center devoted to the study of the Americas cannot be assured by its current curricula and its resident faculty, no matter how well developed the former, nor how well accomplished and dedicated the latter. And in both cases, we will never be able to have in permanent residence all persons who, by their work and accomplishments, are our colleagues; nor, in our own work, be the generating sources for all research and scholarship, creative production, presentation, and performance pertinent to the Center's agendas. Rather, we will have to engage other questions and work, to a significant degree regularly bringing into our midst for extended stays persons who are producing, or have produced, work that sustains and advances the enterprises of the Center. The model here is the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities. Among the various means to these ends to be considered, two, in particular, must be well-secured, robust ventures serving the constituents of the Center: an annual series of seminars and a program hosting visiting post-doctoral fellows. We believe that this type of program cannot be found at any other institution of higher education in the United States of America. This ground-breaking venture thus will demand more of all programmatic units coming together to form it than each faces on its own, especially with regard to working out issues of methodology; subjects and objects of inquiry; justifications, validations, and legitimations of research, scholarship, creative production; and teaching. These will be among the most compelling challenges to be faced in building the Center.
Vital, too, will be efforts to establish formal arrangements to consider presentations and to engage in vigorous discussion and debate. These ends we will pursue by means of an annual seminar series focused on and organized around semester- or year-long themes and issues, with input from each of the Center's programmatic constituents. For example, a possible inaugural thematic, to be taken up during our first years of planning and development, might be "The Americas: ‘Discovery' or ‘Invention'?" or "The Peopling of the Americas." The format of the seminar series would be varied: single-person presentations; panels; symposia, with key personnel drawn from Center faculty and fellows; Vanderbilt faculty; faculty from other local institutions; presenters invited from throughout the Americas. Series events are to be held throughout the academic year, with planning and development for each year's series to be undertaken during the preceding spring semester and summer and carried out by a standing group composed of representative persons from the Center's constituent programs and departments. Funding must be sufficient, each year, to underwrite feature participants (honoraria for non-Vanderbilt participants, travel, accommodations), hosting each event (facilities, receptions), public relations (printed media, mailings, and other such outreach; web-site design, development, and hosting); post-series production of publications (electronic and printed) of presentations; support staff. We estimate that the annual cost of these conferences and seminars would be $25,000 with invited speakers from across the Americas and the Atlantic. Post-Doctoral Fellowships
With our success in realizing the Center as fully envisioned, it will become a powerful magnet for junior, mid-level, an senior scholars, researchers, and teachers concerned with studying some aspect(s) of peoples, culture, environments, economies, political systems, histories, within and among the Americas. Moreover, those of us who will comprise the resident faculty of the Center will need the stimulation and nurturing that can only come from especially promising and accomplished visiting colleagues of other institutions and organizations, in other countries in the Americas (and elsewhere) especially, who have completed their formal training leading to degrees and can contribute to the enrichment of the work of the Center by drawing on and sharing from their ongoing and completed work. Such persons would be invited for an entire calendar or academic year, or some appropriate portion thereof. Funding must be sufficient to underwrite the costs for each fellow, including: round-trip travel to and from Nashville for the period of the fellowship (one such trip); salary; health benefits; research funds and secretarial assistance; private office with normal and expected equipment (computer, phone, etc.); and other support required by the fellow's project (specified in applying, considered by the Center's selection committee and appropriate university officials, and agreed to with the awarding of the fellowship). Total support for each fellow to be negotiated by appropriate parties with the amount of Center's award to be determined by other support a fellow will have, including sabbatic support, other fellowships and awards, etc., with the total amount coming to a fellow, the Center's/Vanderbilt's award included, not to exceed what would be appropriate compensation were the fellow a regular member of the Vanderbilt faculty. We estimate that each post-doctoral fellow would require a budget of approximately $35,000 in salary (plus fringe benefits and moving expenses). Graduate Fellowships Graduate degrees in the humanities and the social sciences at Vanderbilt are granted by fourteen departments (Anthropology, Art and Art History, Classics, Economics, English, French, German, History, Philosophy, Political Science, Religion, Sociology, Spanish and Portuguese, and Psychology) and two interdisciplinary programs (Comparative Literature, Latin American Studies). We propose the creation of ten new graduate fellowships (five-year support) controlled by the Center and distributed among these graduate departments and programs through an internal competition organized by the Center's advisory committee. These fellowships would go to graduate students (in these sixteen departments and programs) if their work promises to be truly interdisciplinary and comparative dealing with the Americas. Graduate students would be recruited through the normal departmental processes and admissions committees with special attention given to those who express an interest in interdisciplinary study. Teaching duties, when applicable, would occur in courses especially designed by the Center. The dissertation committees would include but not be limited to faculty from the Center. We see these fellowships as one of the most powerful vehicles for mobilizing the support of departments and faculty to participate in the activities of the Center, and to encourage their graduate students to do interdisciplinary and comparative work on the Americas.
With an annual stipend of $15,000, and the usual insurance and fees, and an average of 12 credit hours per year (approximately $12,000), the annual cost of each fellowship would be about $30,000 (or $300,00 per year for all ten combined). Internal Grants Program One of the most powerful instruments for drawing faculty and students into a community of scholars discussing and researching common issues is an internal grants program. The Center will need to have an annual program to award small grants to faculty and students that will allow them to pursue research on issues that will advance the intellectual agenda of the Center. In addition to promoting and facilitating research that will eventually lead to publications, this fund will serve as a stimulus for faculty to initiate and continue research on the Americas in an interdisciplinary fashion and setting. It will also help them guide their graduate and undergraduate students into research and publishing on topics that advance comparative and interdisciplinary research on all of the Americas.
This grants program should have available at least $15,000 a year for research proposals from faculty, graduate students, and (in exceptional cases) undergraduates to pursue research on topics that deal with the Americas in an interdisciplinary and comparative approach. Research that requires travel to foreign archives, conferences, and universities should be most highly valued. This grant program could be supplemented by funding from external agencies such as the Tinker Foundation in New York City, a program that provides up to $15,000 a year matching funds for the type of research set out above. Summer Research Funds
The ability to do research over the summer is essential to the success of our Center. For many faculty, research in this area will necessitate extensive expenditures of time and energy and will almost certainly involve travel, both foreign and domestic. Participating faculty must therefore be supported at this time of year to travel to conferences (some of which will be abroad), to travel to libraries to examine documents, to conduct interviews and surveys, to provide summer stipends for graduate students involved in particular research projects, and to the preparation of manuscripts for publication. Because our enterprise involves faculty not just from Arts and Science but from a number of other University units, the expenses incurred in the planning and completion of summer research will vary greatly; some projects will be more costly than others, but all will be essential to the growth and development of the Center. We believe that annual fund of $15,000 would serve as a major instrument for attracting faculty to work with the Center as an active participant in programs and courses. The faculty is the Center's primary resource. Investment in the faculty will produce the dividends of research and teaching that are the Center's mission. We envisage retraining grants as an opportunity for faculty to acquire new skills and methods that will enable them to enlarge their view of the Americas. For example, faculty interested in topics that take them across national borders may participate in intensive summer study in a new language, including Portuguese, Haitian or Canadian French, Spanish or Native American languages and writing systems. Similarly, scholars may wish to take part in workshops that will train them in quantitative methods, computerized approaches to data, survey design and implementation, historiography, or field work methods. Our intention would be to foster grant applications that will allow faculty to work more freely across disciplinary boundaries, across the component units of the Center, and across national and geographic barriers.
Cost: Five retraining grants per year, @ c. $4000 per grant, $20,000 annually. Visiting Scholars Program Although Vanderbilt has substantial resources in all the component units of the Center, there are also missing specializations that can be filled in on a temporary basis by visiting scholars. We anticipate the need for two positions, one to be filled annually, to be chosen by the organizers of the annual seminar. The successful applicant would be a fellow of the Center, an individual whose current research contributed to the goal of the seminar, in which he or she would participate. The intended model is that of the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities. A second position, that of the Visitor to the Center, would be filled on an irregular basis. It would be reserved for individuals whose background and scholarship are of special interest to the Center. These could include individuals who may be, but are not necessarily, academics. For example, they might be politicians, Native American leaders, creative artists and writers and others whose works represent or shape the culture of the Americas. These individuals, in applying to the Center, would propose a project that could reasonably be completed in the course of a year. Their responsibilities would include participation in the lectures and presentations of the Center, public performances or other appropriate contributions to the work of the Center. Costs: Fellow of the Center Program, Annual Cost: One semester's salary up to $35,000, c. $30,000 annually (the assumption is that the successful applicant would have a semester's leave from the home institution).
Visitor Program. Annual stipend $40,000, plus $5000 in costs for research, travel, materials or other appropriate uses. If filled on a biannual basis, $22,500 per year.
Proposed Budget for the Center
Budget Notes: (1) A permanent endowment for the center of $5,000,000 would generate approximately $500,000 per year for annual operating costs. (2) The majority of the annual operating costs budgeted above are for graduate fellowships. Many of these could come out of new endowed funds in the capital campaign. (3) The university should raise funds to fully endow three chairs that will bring prestige and cohesion to the work of the Center. Fringe benefits are estimated (generously) at 25%.
Current Faculty Working on Topics Linked to the Proposed Center This link below opens a pdf file of a preliminary survey of faculty whose research and teaching would contribute to the activities of the Center. The list includes more than 100 faculty, primarily in the College of Arts and Science, but also in Blair, Divinity, and Peabody. We believe a number of faculty in Owen and the Medical School will also make important connections with the Center.
  (Acrobat reader required)
Current Interdisciplinary Programs that Would Contribute to the Center and Current Course Offerings
African American Studies
American and Southern Studies
Comparative Literature
European Studies
Latin American and Iberian Studies
Similar Centers or Institutes
Center for the Americas
The Hemispheric Institute on the Americas
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