NASHVILLE, Tenn. ñ Bi-weekly conversations this fall among 13 students at Vanderbilt University will be the modest beginnings of a movement designed to eventually transform the experience of every graduate student on campus.
The workshop, sponsored by Vanderbilt‘s Center for the Americas, will bring together top graduate students in every phase of their academic careers to “consider the possibilities,” says Vera Kutzinski, director of the Center for the Americas.
Among those participating will be students researching transsexuality in the Americas, Mexican and U.S. cinema, and African societies in Cuba and Colombia. All have been awarded fellowships worth between $3,000 and $25,000 to participate in the experiment.
“It‘s a broad cross-section of people in different disciplines at different stages of their careers, talking to each other about what it means to do interdisciplinary work,” Kutzinski said. “The hope is that the Center for the Americas will help Vanderbilt become a model campus for innovative graduate education. The workshops and core courses that the center will develop in the next few years aim at balancing the need for individual achievement with the sort of intellectual curiosity that leads students to want to engage more fully with peers and faculty from other fields and even to collaborate with them on projects.”
The center‘s biweekly workshops will be led by Kutzinski and Lucius Outlaw, professor of philosophy and associate provost for undergraduate education. They will encourage students to consider fundamental questions about how knowledge is produced and used in today‘s societies.
“If you‘re studying literature of a certain period, you also might want to deepen your research by looking into anthropological or ethnographic research on that era, or medical historiography,” Kutzinski said. “You might want to find out if there is a corresponding cultural movement in another country, in the Americas or elsewhere.
“The question should not be, ‘Why do this?‘ It should be, ‘How could we not do this?‘”
The Center for the Americas was established in 2003 to connect scholars interested in the Americas who might not otherwise connect and collaborate. Kutzinski, who holds the Martha Rivers Ingram Chair of English at Vanderbilt, left Yale University to set up and direct the Center for the Americas in July 2004.
Kutzinski sees the Center for the Americas graduate fellows program as an alternative to the trend of “professionalization” in U.S. graduate schools.
“The argument that we need to ‘professionalize‘ our graduate students in order to make them more competitive in the academic job market needs some serious rethinking,” she explained.
“There is no question that graduate students need to know more about how to place an article or book review and what sorts of conferences to attend just as much as they need to be trained how to construct sound and compelling scholarly arguments and teach well. Professionalization, which is formal collective mentoring, has certainly given students more systematic exposure to the professional culture of their chosen discipline, and that is a very good thing. They need to have that sort of information.”
But the movement has gone too far and the process is becoming formulaic, Kutzinski said.
“At this point, professionalization as a system of mentoring is producing students whose academic profiles look more and more alike,” she said. “It is becoming harder and harder to find new Ph.D.s who really stand out from the crowd. Professionalization seems to places too much value on conformity and too little on intellectual daring and creativity. In the end, I don‘t see that this approach produces the kinds of students that academic search committees look for. The irony is that by over-professionalizing our students, we are actually making them less competitive.”
The Center for the Americas fellowships are all merit-based and range in duration from one to five years. Fellows are selected from applicants enrolled or entering Vanderbilt doctoral programs in the humanities, social sciences and professional schools.
The 2005-2006 recipients of Center for the Americas graduate fellowships, with major and primary research interest:
* Nicholas Beasley; History; Christian liturgy and social power in British plantation colonies
* Fernanda Boidi; Political Science; comparative Latin American studies
* Carmen CaÒete-Quesada; Spanish and Portuguese; national identity discourses in Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic
* Christian Long; English; urban planning and film in the Americas
* Jeffrey Menne; English; Mexican cinema
* Rachel Nisselson; French; comparative francophone literatures and cultures
* Peter Redvers-Lee; Human and Organizational Development (Peabody); the Afro-Ecuadorian movement
* Nicole Seymour; English; transsexuality in a hemispheric context
* David Solodkov; Spanish and Portuguese; foundational ethnographies of the Americas
* Katherine Taylor Haynes; Leadership, Policy and Organizations (Peabody); Latino parents and education
* Brad Teague; Teaching and Learning (Peabody); transnational literacies
* Michael Tidwell; Anthropology; the nature of ethic relations in highland Chiapas
* David Wheat; History; African society in Havana and Cartagena
Media contact: Jim Patterson, (615) 322-NEWS
Jim.patterson@vanderbilt.edu