Groups offer new design for scholarship

Scholars have discussed their work informally, within and across disciplines, since Plato was a pup. However, a new innovation for university researchers creates a cohesive framework that helps faculty and students more effectively work across disciplines and departments.

Eight research circles operating this fall endeavor to encourage and support forays across disciplinary lines, says Louis N. Bickford, associate director of the Global Studies Program, which administers the circles for the university’s International Institute.

Once the groups receive circle “incorporation” from the institute, they are eligible for about $40,000 per circle to support the visits of guest speakers, workshops and major conferences.

The university has been on the frontline of interdisciplinary study for years. For example, the institute is home to 10 area studies programs and five programs that look at international issues from a global perspective. The Madison campus also has cross-disciplinary academic units, such as Women’s Studies and the related Women’s Studies Research Center.

However, David M. Trubek, a law professor and director of the International Institute, says research circles aim to investigate new areas in which scholars might work together.

“The circles were created because there are issues such as democratization, ethnic conflict and the impact of the global economy that were not really being dealt with in traditional lines of academic demarcation,” Trubek says. “Circles have been established to deal with topics of current interest to faculty and advanced graduate students from several disciplines.”

Currently, various groups are investigating Legacies of Authoritarianism; Cultural Pluralism; Labor and the Global Economy; Media, Performance and Identity; Border and Transcultural Studies; Environment and Development; Global Governance; and Women and Citizenship.

Two groups, Legacies of Authoritarianism and Media, Performance and Identity, recently received $350,000 in Ford Foundation funding as part of a national effort to revitalize area studies. The Ford grant is helping to build global networks of scholars working in these areas of interest; emerging research from the circles also enhances instruction in UW–Madison classrooms and offers educational opportunities to the community.

And that’s not all: “New textbooks, videos and new courses to be taught at UW–Madison are just a few of the products anticipated from the circles,” says Leigh Payne, professor of political science and chair of the Legacies group, which recently brought its international network together in South Africa. Two more workshops, in the Philippines and Argentina, are planned for the next two years.

Although the circles themselves are intended to be temporary, clearly their impact on the university and on scholarship in general has the potential to be profound. Border and Transcultural Studies chair Susan Friedman, professor of English and women’s studies, says her group has proved a vital player in Chancellor David Ward’s strategic hiring initiative. During the last round in the fiscal year 1998-99, the group was able to recruit to UW–Madison two faculty, Rob Nixon and Anne McClintock. Nixon’s work spans contemporary African, British, Caribbean and American literature and culture. McClintock is on the scholarly frontier of race, gender and sexuality from the late Victorian era to the present.

Nixon says the presence of the research circle was an important factor in the couple’s decision to choose UW–Madison over Duke University.

“We had come from an environment where departments were compartments, and it was assumed that your closest colleagues, intellectually and socially, would come from your home department. This hampered the intellectual growth of faculty and students alike,” says Nixon, professor of English.

“The intellectual fluidity that the border studies circle encourages is the path of the future,” agrees McClintock, a professor of English and women’s studies.

In addition to McClintock and Nixon, the border studies program brought strategic hires Guillermina De Ferrari, a specialist in contemporary Caribbean narrative, to the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, and Kenneth M. George to the Department of Anthropology. Like Nixon, George studies a broad range, from art in the public sphere to religion and ritual to symbolic expression.

“The research circle was a very attractive lure in persuading me to move to UW–Madison,” he says. “From my vantage point, the intellectual and curricular energies I’ve found in the circle are different from those found in many other formal interdisciplinary programs.”

More information: Louis Bickford, 262-0646; lbickford@facstaff.wisc.edu. Or visit: http://www.wisc.edu/internationalinstitute/.