ICGC is pleased to announce that it has received an award of $910,000 from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for the renewal of a collaboration with the University of the Western Cape’s Centre for Humanities Research (CHR). Karen Brown and Frances Vavrus, ICGC Co-Directors, will lead the effort, called the "New Directions in Collaborative Education: UMN-UWC Partnership." They will work closely with CHR Director and ICGC alumnus Premesh Lalu.
The ICGC and CHR collaborative was established in 2005 to link the centers, programs, and faculty and staff at the two universities engaged in teaching, research, and outreach around interdisciplinary approaches to global issues. The collaboration to date has established an exceptional transnational intellectual community with the previous Mellon grants supporting 21 doctoral fellows from Minnesota, 12 doctoral fellows from UWC, five faculty exchange participants from each campus, two Mellon research chairs, and a host of courses, lectures, workshops and collaborative events and innovative research projects.
The new grant will focus on teaching, the arts in an interdisciplinary context, and the support of exceptional and diverse graduate fellows and faculty. It will support the objectives of both partner institutions to provide more pedagogical training and experience to graduate fellows and, at ICGC, to more fully integrate humanities and arts across its interdisciplinary curriculum.
Welcome New Scholars!
2015 ICGC Scholars
The 2015 ICGC Scholars cohort—the twenty-seventh—includes 15 new Scholars. The Scholars represent nine different departments within five colleges and schools at the University of Minnesota. They come from India, USA/Puerto Rico, Costa Rica, Bahrain, Uganda, China, and Zimbabwe. These exceptional students bring a wealth of intellectual energy, academic and personal experience, and a shared commitment to understanding issues of social justice.
With the support of the University's Office of the Vice President for Research and MnDRIVE funding, ICGC has welcomed the first recipients of its new fellowship to support graduate student research focused on interdisciplinary approaches to global food security, with a particular emphasis on questions of social justice and global food security.
Through the partnership between ICGC and the Centre for Humanities Research (directed by Professor Premesh Lalu, an ICGC alumnus) at the University of the Western Cape, our collaborative graduate education and faculty research initiative offers faculty and student exchanges; graduate student fellowships; and joint research projects, workshops, conferences, and courses. Current activities include an ongoing faculty and doctoral fellow exchange program with faculty and students from each institution spending time conducting research and engaging with students and faculty on the partner campus for periods of two to six months. Aidan Erasmus and Lauren Van Der Rede are ICGC’s 2015 visiting doctoral scholars.
Aidan Erasmus
Aidan Erasmus is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in History and is based at the Department of History and the Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape. His M.A. examined the permutations of race alongside the development of the local rock music scene in South Africa from the 1960s through to the present. Interested in questions of sound after apartheid, music and its repercussions, and postcolonial reverberations, his doctoral project seeks to think war through sound in an attempt to make war audible, and is concerned with the ways in which history might be thought of as resonant. He is also the host of a program on South African music called "The Shortwave" on the Wrong Rock Show on Bush Radio 89.5 FM, a local community radio station in Cape Town, South Africa.
Lauren Van Der Rede
Lauren Van Der Rede grew up in beautiful Cape Town, South Africa, where she has also had the privilege of studying at the University of the Western Cape (UWC). She is currently based in UWC's English Department and the Centre for Humanities Research, where she is an A.W. Mellon Fellow. With a focus on Africa, she studies the relationship between violence, psychoanalysis, trauma, and the literary. Her master’s thesis examined representations of the African child in select contemporary films, arguing that the African child is often represented as a liminal, ambiguous, and often paradoxical figure, through which the selected films are able to, at least to some extent, transcend Afropessimism. For the purposes of her doctoral research project she is looking at select instances of genocide and genocidal violence in Africa, their post-traumatic effects, and their literary representations, in the hope of contributing to psychoanalytic theory through the development of a new concept.
Dr. Truelove (Sma) Mkhwanazi is a faculty member from the University of South Africa (UNISA). She was at ICGC for the month of September and was supported by a VisionKeepers grant from UNISA. During her stay at ICGC, Dr. Mkhwanazi worked closely with her research mentor, Frances Vavrus, Professor in the Department of Organizational Leadership, Policy, and Development, and Co-Director of ICGC. Dr. Mkhwanazi worked on a paper she will present in South Africa on teacher professional development, and on the planning of a joint research project with Dr. Vavrus. Dr. Mkhwanazi also met with scholars in her field of educational leadership and visited a high school in St. Paul. In addition, she presented her research as part of ICGC’s Brown Bag Talk Series, which is available for viewing here.
Dr. Truelove (Sma) Mkhwanazi
A Workable World
Schwartzberg Endowment
ICGC is pleased to announce the establishment of the Joseph E. Schwartzberg Workable World Trust Fellowship. Joseph E. Schwartzberg, distinguished professor emeritus of geography at the University of Minnesota and preeminent world federalist scholar, has made an endowment to support ICGC Fellowships at the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change. Schwartzberg Workable World Trust Fellows will receive an award in support of their work toward global governance.
ICGC has a full schedule of events planned this fall, including brown bags, distinguished lectures, and other special events. We hope to see you there!
ICGC has collaborated with the Digital Content Library of the U of M to archive its media. Video clips recorded from ICGC's Brown Bag Talk Series, Distinguished Lectures, Special Events, Co-Sponsored Events, and much more are now viewable at this site. You can search for any recorded ICGC event by looking up "ICGC" in the search field. ICGC is pleased to have this collaboration and be able to save its history through this outstanding resource.
The DCL archives almost 300,000 learning objects from many different disciplines in image, video, and audio formats. These objects come from a variety of sources including purchased and licensed, original research materials and copystand photography.
