Center to give new attention to international view

The new Center for International Studies in the College of Arts and Science, which recently held its inaugural event in a symposium on the Middle East, now has its first director and its first four fellows.

David Pong, professor of history, has been named acting director of the center, which is designed to promote internationalism both on the University of Delaware campus and in the community.

His appointment will continue through the end of August while officials conduct an international search for a permanent director, according to Thomas M. DiLorenzo, dean of the college, who announced the selection.

Members of the first class of fellows are James M. Brophy, history; Daniel Green, political science and international relations; Nancy Nobile, foreign languages and literatures; and Julian Yates, English.

DiLorenzo said the Center for International Studies has been in the works for about a decade and was given fresh impetus during the fall semester, resulting in its formal establishment this spring. He said he believes it will provide an important focus on the growing internationalism in all aspects of daily life.

"It is cliché to say this, but we really do live in a global village," DiLorenzo said. "Today, our students need to be more aware of the world around them, of global cultures and global issues. We need to educate them in a way that they can go off and do exciting things."

The center will work to nurture a community of scholars, students and citizens that is alive to the opportunities and challenges of the world today, he said. That will be accomplished by promoting faculty involvement in international research, teaching and other professional activities, and by providing students with the global awareness required to function successfully in an increasingly interactive world.

Pong, the center's initial director, is a professor of history and director of the East Asian Studies Program. His selection was "a natural," DiLorenzo said, because of Pong's experience in international studies and his commitment to the University.

The dean said Pong is moving "aggressively" to define the work of the center as it takes flight.

Pong said he is "simply thrilled" to be the first director, adding that the founding of the center "is a major landmark in the history of the College of Arts and Science and the University" because of the need to embrace internationalism.

"We are far away from the days when it was news that people could go around the world in eight days," he said. "Today, we can fly from New York City to Hong Kong, exactly half the way around the globe, in about 13 hours. Few academic subjects can be taught without reference to something else in another part of the world. Nothing can be taught well without putting things in context and that context, more often than not, is international in nature.

"Even in the so-called hard sciences," Pong said, "such matters as genetically modified foods and the production of drugs for such killer diseases as AIDS cannot be understood without consideration of their political and social ramifications all over the globe.

"But, there is a human side to this question, too. We have on campus a number of students and scholars who come from all over the world. They bring to us new perspectives on almost every aspect of life and work. They enrich our lives just as we, in many instances, provide a positive environment for their research and studies. Diversity itself is a lesson in life, and diversity should be inclusive."

An important aspect of the center will be the Fellows Program, through which the center and the college will provide professors course reductions to enable them to work intensively on international topics of interest.

The initial fellows are important in setting the tone, DiLorenzo said, because they will bring a "multidisciplinary perspective to the topic, and that is something we have never done before."

He said faculty in the humanities tend to work individually, writing books and making presentations, and are "not necessarily used to working together."

The center's first fellows will focus on the topic, "Civil Society, Citizenship and the Public Sphere: An Interdisciplinary Seminar on Rethinking Modern Politics."

The four fellows who will pool their knowledge are:

• Brophy, an associate professor of history, whose primary focus is on the history of central Europe, specifically Germany;
  
  
• Green, an associate professor of political science and international relations, who specializes in comparative politics and international development;
  
  
• Nobile, an associate professor of foreign languages and literatures, who has research interests in German Romanticism and in late 18th- and early 19th-century theories of pedagogy; and
  
  

Yates, an associate professor of English, with interests in Medieval and Renaissance England.

DiLorenzo said the center will strive to internationalize curriculum, provide travel grants for international study and presentations and enhance study abroad and better integrate it with academic programs.

Also, it will serve as a clearinghouse for information on research already being conducted by faculty. "Many faculty are doing international work already, but there has been no way to provide that information to the campus community," DiLorenzo said. "This will pull that together."

A key goal of the center, DiLorenzo said, will be to bring to the campus topics of interest to students and the community through symposia, colloquia and lectures. It is hoped the center can sponsor one or more such events a semester.

"It could be a presentation on a region, it could be a topic of importance to all regions of the world; it could be a research area, such as migration," DiLorenzo said.

The initial such event, "The United States in the Middle East: Politics, Religion and Violence," was held Feb. 21 in Mitchell Hall.

–Neil Thomas