July 21, 2003
Three UCSC faculty awarded Presidential Chairs
By Scott Rappaport
Three faculty members at UCSChistory professor Edmund Burke III,
psychology professor Barbara Rogoff, and literature professor Helene
Moglenhave been appointed to Presidential Chairs on the Santa
Cruz campus.
UCSC Chancellor M.R.C. Greenwood made the appointments, which extend
from July 1, 2003, through June 30, 2006. Annual support for each chair
is $45,000 and will fund proposals made by the appointees previous to
their selection.
"These three exceptional scholars help distinguish our campus,
and it is an honor to recognize them," Greenwood said. "Each
professor has crafted a proposal to develop innovative research by faculty
and students. All of the projects promise to have far-reaching and enduring
impact."
The Santa Cruz campus has appointed five Presidential Chairs in the
past: Professor Hayden White, Historical Studies (1983-88), Professor
Richard Wasserstrom, Moral Philosophy (1988-91), Professor Angela Davis,
African American and Feminist Studies (1995-97), Professor David Haussler,
Bioinformatics (2000-03), and Professor David Hoy, Interdisciplinary
Critical Thinking (2000-03).
The president of the University of California supports Presidential
Chairs on each of the 10 UC campuses through an endowment established
in 1981 by the UC Regents. The positions are offered to distinguished
members of the university's faculty and are intended to encourage new
or interdisciplinary program development or to enhance quality in existing
academic programs.
Professor Burke is a major figure in the field of world
history. His proposal to establish a World History Center at UCSC would
not only benefit the History Department, but would also strengthen the
campus's reputation for excellence in research and world history. Burkes
proposal is broad in its scope, and is meant to be inclusive in order
to bring together a number of colleagues as he works to initiate the
process of developing a new cluster of research and teaching in the
History Department.
"The establishment of a center for world history at UCSC will
be the first such center in UC and has a twofold mission," Burke
noted. "One aim is to provide training in teaching world history
for history faculty and graduate students at all levels of the history
curriculum including lower-division, upper-division and graduate courses.
A second aim is to support the department's research cluster in Colonialism,
Race and Trans-National Movements in conjunction with the all-UC
multicampus research group, The World History Workshop. World
and trans-national history is a major new research trend within the
field of history, and this project aims to foster its further development."
Professor Moglen, a well-known literary critic and feminist
theorist, is the director of the new Institute for Advanced Feminist
Research at UCSC. The Institute brings together faculty, graduate students,
artists, journalists, and public intellectuals to work on projects that
are historical, international, and interdisciplinary in conception,
and collaborative and experimental in practice.
Moglen has proposed to use the resources awarded to the Chair to support
programming for the Institute. Her intellectual qualifications, leadership
skills, contacts across campus, and openness to the visions of the larger
feminist community have all contributed toward the remarkable success
that the Institute has already achieved.
"With the support of funds provided by the Presidential Chair,
I hope to help realize the ambitious goals of the Institutes participants,"
Moglen said.
Professor Rogoff is the UC Santa Cruz Foundation Professor
of Psychology and an internationally recognized scholar in the field
of developmental psychology. Her proposal is to assemble an interdisciplinary,
intergenerational set of scholars to study how social interaction is
organized in support of learning in communities where schooling has
not been prevalent, particularly in indigenous communities of North
and Central America.
"The Chair will allow me to convene a group of leading scholars
and students to make headway on understanding the processes of supporting
learning within informal community settings," Rogoff noted. "In
many of these communities, children learn very effectively through being
involved with their families' everyday activities. Studying how such
engagements are structured will help us understand how children's learning
and adult-child interaction varies across communities, and how learning
everywhere might be facilitated."
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