Director's Corner
I am delighted to report that the Center for European Studies (CES) has taken enormous strides forward in the past twelve months to markedly enhance its national and international profile.
In 2010-11 we sponsored and co-sponsored a number of scholarly events: from the massive Cold War Cultures conference spearheaded principally by Katie Arens in Germanic Studies, to the colloquium Transatlantic Intolerance directed by Terri Givens in the Government Department, to the focused workshop on European Democratization in a Comparative Perspective organized by Kurt Weyland in the Government Department. We assisted faculty with targeted domestic and international research travel grants: Philip Broadbent (Germanic Studies) on the impact of the "cool" in West Germany; Benjamin Gregg (Government Department) on the non-Germans approached in East Germany by the Stasi; Luisa Nardini (School of Music) on liturgical prosulas found in Beneventan manuscripts; and Tatjana Lichtenstein (History Department) on Jews and non-Jews in mixed relationships in the Bohemian Lands during the first part of the twentieth century We have also substantially expanded our community ties throughout Austin and Texas, thanks to the hard work of our Program Coordinator Sally Dickson, who heads our vigorous outreach program, and thanks to our ongoing fruitful collaboration with Hemispheres, TLC, and COERLL.
Our faculty Interest Groups, about which I urge you to read more in our e-newsletters and website, remain strong and continue to grow. We encourage faculty to join them. They have helped foster vibrant intellectual communities among scholars from across campus, as well as with faculty from colleges and universities throughout the US and Europe. Most recently they helped bring in, with the assistance of the HRC, such luminaries as Anthony Grafton of Princeton, the current president of the American Historical Association. Finally, these Interest Groups have assisted UT faculty themselves in refining their scholarly projects for publication, such as-to take some recent examples from the Renaissance, the field I'm most invested in-Marc Bizer's Homer and the Politics of Authority in Renaissance France (Oxford, 2011), Hannah Chapelle Wojciehowski's Group Identity in the Renaissance World (Cambridge, 2011), and Andrew dell'Antonio's Listening as Spiritual Practice in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley, 2011).
Significantly, in the past year CES has also become a National Resource Center (NRC) funded through Title VI from the US Department of Education, and most recently an EU Center of Excellence (EUCE), funded through the EU Delegation. Together these grants, totaling roughly two million dollars over a four-year period, will benefit the entire UT campus and the broader community. They will fund everything from graduate and undergraduate fellowships to faculty and student research and travel grants; from undergraduate courses in business to those on ethics and leadership; from large-scale conferences to a variety of ongoing workshops and lecture series; from outreach efforts for K-12 to those dedicated exclusively to the business community; from yearly course collaborations with Huston-Tillotson University that focus on European politics and history to yearly seminar collaborations with the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris.
Just as importantly, these grants have involved the cooperation and financial assistance of a host of deans, department chairs, and center directors. As a result, they will bring together the entire university community-the College of Liberal Arts, the School of Law, the School of Communications, the School of Undergraduate Studies, the School of Business, the Cockrell School of Engineering, the School of Fine Arts, and the LBJ School of Public Affairs. I am grateful for everyone's support, and I'd like to take the opportunity to also thank both Gary Freeman (Chair of the Department of Government) and Mary Neuburger (Chair of Slavic and Eurasian Studies, Director of CREEES, and a faculty member in the History Department) for agreeing to serve as the Director and Associate Director, respectively, of the new EU Center of Excellence housed in CES. I will remain the principal investigator of both grants and be responsible for their implementation.
Over the course of the upcoming year we will inform students, faculty, and the community of our events and funding opportunities through our e-newsletters. In the meantime, we encourage everyone to consult our website, which we are in the process of expanding, for information about so many things-both at UT and beyond-pertaining to Europe and the EU.
