Interdisciplinary Humanities Research Center established
Ann Ardis

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11:15 a.m., Nov. 17, 2009----The University of Delaware College of Arts and Sciences has announced the establishment of an Interdisciplinary Humanities Research Center, which is being supported through a generous grant from the Unidel Foundation

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Ann Ardis, senior associate dean of the humanities in the College of Arts and Sciences, will serve as director of the center.

Ardis said the core mission of the new center is to:

-- Strengthen humanities research, enhance its visibility both regionally and nationally, and provide support for initiatives involving multi-disciplinary research teams and inter- and intra-institutional partnerships;

-- Support creative, intellectually ambitious course development and curriculum innovations designed to bring cutting-edge research into the classroom and engage more undergraduates in humanities research; and

-- Significantly enhance the University's public humanities programming, thereby contributing to the University's overarching goal of making Newark a destination: an intellectually and culturally rich and exciting environment for students, faculty, and the community.

As the American Association of Universities noted in its 2004 report, Reinvigorating the Humanities: Enhancing Research and Education on Campus and Beyond, “No university can aspire to recognition as one of the country's great public universities which is not recognized as a leading center of research and teaching in the arts and humanities.”

Ardis said humanities research centers across the country play a key role in strengthening the intellectual and creative life of university communities. Some, such as Stanford University's Humanities Center, devote most of their resources to bringing scholars from other institutions to campus for residencies as brief as several days or as long as an academic year.

Others, such as the Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities at the University of California Berkeley, are primarily committed to stimulating dynamic cross-disciplinary exchanges among on researchers and students on their home campus.

All of them, however, have been established with full confidence in the fundamental role that the humanities, broadly defined, have to play in the intellectual life of a great university, Ardis said, adding the most innovative seek to break down the barriers between the “ivory tower” and the world at large, engaging faculty, students, and the general public in matters of broad humanistic concern.

UD's new Interdisciplinary Humanities Research Center has launched its activities through three internal grant programs: a grant program to support multidisciplinary research teams; a grant program to support distinguished visiting artists and scholars; and a grant program to support cross-disciplinary collaborations and curriculum innovations through the establishment of “integrated semester” experiences for either graduate students or undergraduates. Those experiences involve co-enrollment in at least two courses offered by different departments and the coordination of special events programming -- such as on-campus speakers or film viewings, off-campus field trips or tours of exhibits, service-learning or community-based research -- for all of the students enrolled in these courses.

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