University of Pittsburgh
University Center for International Studies
Global Studies Center
Newsletter
Summer 2018
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Dear friends of Global Studies,
I write to share some year-end news with you. First, I am happy to announce that Mari Webel, Department of History, has been selected as next year's Global Studies Faculty Fellow, and Karen Park, Department of Linguistics, has been chosen as the winner of the 2018-2020 Global Academic Partnership (GAP) award. You'll find profiles of each of them and their projects below.
I also want to congratulate our colleague Maja Konitzer, Program Manager for Global Studies, on the successful defense of her doctoral dissertation,
Promoting Global Competence Among High School Students. And congratulations are also in order to all of the students who graduated recently with a Global Studies Certificate - we look forward to seeing where life takes you next.
Finally, there will be some turnover in our team. Jared McCormick, the UCIS Visiting Professor in Contemporary Global issues, will be taking up a new position at NYU in the fall. Jared has done a great job working with our students, especially on the research toolkit series and the e-portfolios. We wish him good luck as he moves into this next phase of his career. Li
sa Bromberg, Assistant Director for Outreach, will be leaving Global Studies effective May 11 to pursue an exciting opportunity with Duolingo. We're grateful to Lisa for all of her work to expand our inreach, outreach, and community engagement efforts, and we will miss her energy, creativity, and wit. We wish her all success in her new life as a techie!
As Oakland goes quiet, at Global Studies we're gearing up for a busy summer. Applications for the next round of Title VI funding will be due sometime soon, and we're working hard to prepare the best proposal possible. In late June, we'll again host the
Pennsylvania Governor's School for Global and International Studies. We're preparing for the next iteration of our annual seminar series,
Humanizing the Global, Globalizing the Human.
The theme will be cities and urban transformations, and I would welcome your suggestions about scholars in your fields whose work is related to this theme and has a global dimension.
It's been a full and fulfilling year at Global Studies, and I am grateful to all of you for your engagement with us in our work. As ever, I welcome your feedback and suggestions as we build the Global Studies Center into a hub for innovative, interdisciplinary study at Pitt; you can reach me at
[email protected].
With best wishes for a productive - and restful - summer!
Michael |
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Global Studies Faculty Fellow
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The Global Studies Center proudly announces
Dr. Mari Webel, assistant professor of history,
as the
2018-19 GSC Faculty Fellow
.
Each year, the GSC selects one outstanding University of Pittsburgh faculty member whose scholarship advances the Center's mission. With GSC's support, Webel will convene a workshop on Defining the Neglected Tropical Diseases: Research, Development, and Global Health Equity in February 2019. Interdisciplinary scholars and public health practitioners will discuss new research on the emergence of the "neglected tropical diseases" (NTDs) as an operative and imaginative category in global health in the past 40 years. As the first in a two-part series, the workshop will inform Webel's book project examining the rise of the "neglected tropical diseases" (NTDs) in post-colonial global health amid changing ideas about economic development, the advent of HIV/AIDS, and the increasing pharmaceuticalization of health in Africa. During her fellowship, Webel will also undertake archival research at the World Health Organization, the British National Archives, and the Rockefeller Foundation, as well as develop a related undergraduate course on "Drugs, Diseases, and Development."
The Faculty Fellowship is designed to promote transnational research and includes a course release; up to $15,000 toward scholarly events (e.g. workshops, conferences, exhibitions, performances, or seminars); and an additional $5,000 for related research, travel, and curricular development. Applications for the next academic year will be available
here
and are due November 1, 2018. You can direct questions to
Jessica Pickett
in the meantime.
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Global Academic Partnership (GAP)
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 Dr. Karen Park
, assistant professor of linguistics, has been awarded a Global Academic Partnership (GAP) grant for "
Integrating Scholarship and Practice Towards a Global Model of Biocultural Conservation.
" Along with collaborators at the University of Oxford, the Cambridge Conservation Initiative, the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, and BirdLife International, Park studies how people across diverse language backgrounds engage with the natural world through naming, metaphor, and myth. She and her research team are applying this research to the hypothesis that linguistic diversity has the potential to protect biodiversity and are investigating the mutual benefits of uniting linguistic and biological conservation. (To learn more about how language encodes our knowledge of the natural world, watch Park's "Musings from Cloud Cuckoo Land.")
GAP funds will support a series of related language documentation workshops, graduate student exchanges, and public outreach events beginning in Fall 2018. The centerpiece will be a Biocultural Diversity Conference to take place at Pitt in September 2019 to explore the intersections of linguistic and biological diversity, culture, and conservation practice. This exciting project complements Park's other research on language change and endangerment in the Pacific and theoretical approaches to structure and meaning in language. In a similar vein, another ongoing GAP project on refugees as an emerging frontier of humanitarian governance led by Dr. Heath Cabot is also entering its second year as part of a GSC initiative on migration.
The GAP provides $40,000 over the course of two years to support ongoing campus programming that amplifies the Global Studies Center's transnational themes and enriches the intellectual environment at Pitt. This award is generously sponsored by the Office of the Provost and the University Center for International Studies to help Pitt faculty develop interdisciplinary research collaborations, curriculum development, student exchanges, and other scholarly ties that enhance the University of Pittsburgh's international profile through institutional partnerships. Proposals for the next grant competition are due March 1, 2019. Please contact Jessica Pickett for further details on the application process.
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Congratulations to GSC's April 2018 graduates!
This year's undergraduate students represent 24 majors from three professional schools and the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences. They studied abroad in 25 different countries. They are now heading overseas to teach English in China, Spain, France and Taiwan, working for Peace Corp in Indonesia, entering graduate programs at Georgetown, GSPH at Pitt, University College London, University of Maryland, working with City Year, Ashoka, joining the Navy's Nuclear Propulsion Program, and others are exploring opportunities.
Our graduate certificate students earned degrees from the
Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences, GSPIA, GSPH, Law, and Social Work.
They have secured positions with the US Center for Disease Control, Allegheny Health Department, as faculty at
New College of Florida with others studying for the Bar Exam, and seeking employment.
Congratulations to 2018 Boren Fellowship and Fulbright Award Recipients!
Olivia
Peters (classics, religious studies), will study Swahili in Tanzania. She also served as a residence assistance for
Pennsylvania Governor's School for Global and International Studies
last su
mmer.
Meg Harris (political science), is heading to Japan to study Japanese
. Meg was one of our 2017-2018 GSC student ambassadors. Meg studied in Japan in the summer of '17 as a Nationality Room Scholarship recipient.
Juules van Leusden (Chinese, political science), will travel to Taiwan to study Chinese. Juules received both an academic and summer Foreign and Area Studies Fellowship from Global Studies in 2017.
Fulbright ETA
Lauren Manning '18 (Chinese) will teach English in Taiwan. Lauren plans on studying law after her return to the US. She was a Global Studies student ambassador in Fall 2016 as well as during 2017-2018.
Fulbright U.S. Student Grant
Kate Andrews '18 (political science) will conduct independent research in in gender-based violence prevention and awareness in Montevideo, Uruguay.
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