University Center for International Studies Global Studies Center
University Center for International Studies Global Studies Center

Message from the Director

Message from the Director

Welcome to the Fall 2014 issue of the Global Studies Newsletter. This issue offers you recent news and key updates on our efforts in the past six months (June through November 2014), as well as a glimpse of our upcoming projects.  We welcome your comments, interest, and potential collaboration.  The activities described below will give you some context for both our continuing activities and our changes in focus.

Update.  In Summer 2014 the Global Studies Center successfully completed its inaugural four-year funding cycle (2010-2014) as a National Research Center (Title VI), supported by the US Department of Education and supplemented by Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships (FLAS).  Our four foci for that first 2010-2014 cycle—Global Economy, Global Health, Global Security, Global Society—enabled us to move ahead supporting curricular changes that will continue to augment the global profile of Pitt’s academic offerings.  These changes include the development of fourteen Pitt courses with new or substantially revised global-studies content across Pitt schools in nine departments.  The first funding cycle laid the groundwork in the next competition cycle (2015-2018) for the transition to a new and more concentrated focus on Human Rights/Global Health.

In preparation for that impending NRC application, GSC initiated or collaborated on four 2014 Human Rights/Global Health Summer Seminars, in advance of the 2015-2018 competition.  Each seminar was designed for a different constituency and venue:

  1. For international scholars: Globalization and Health: East and West. A June 2014 summer school organized and led by World History Center Director Patrick Manning, with support from Pitt’s Ford Institute for Human Security and Humanities Center, as well as the Universities of St. Andrew, Hanyang, Leipzig, and Tampere;
  2. For US teachers: Fulbright-Hays.  This four-week summer seminar in Jordan included work at the Orphan Welfare Society (Baqaa Refugee Camp, a Palestinian refugee camp outside Amman);
  3. For US undergraduates: Global Justice?  The two-week summer seminar, held at the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme (Paris) with international faculty, was a new collaboration with the international research network Cities for the Cultures of Peace;
  4. For high-school students: Global Issues.  This two-week summer seminar, in partnership with the World Affairs Council of Pittsburgh and participation from 23 high-schools, offered talks by international workers from refugee camps, climate-change research and public-health institutes.  Coursework included 75 minutes each day of Arabic or Chinese.  Guest speakers included Carolyn Miles (CEO, Save the Children) and Steve Inskeep (Host, NPR’s Morning Edition).

These four Human Rights/Global Health summer seminars, across a broad spectrum of constituencies and sites, aimed to demonstrate the Center’s commitment to its proposed focus and position GSC in the subsequent 2015-2018 competition.

Outcome.  We are pleased to announce that in October 2014 the Global Studies Center was informed it had won its bid for four-year NRC support, with a new focus on Human Security/Global Health.  In the most recent cycle, Pitt Global Studies survived a reduction in “International” centers from 11 to 7.  GSC was also successful in the foreign-language (FLAS) fellowships competition, in which its available fellowships were raised 75%.  The funding has given us the opportunity to bring our other available resources into closer alignment, to leverage funds, scholarly efforts, and staff support to maximize each of our projects.

Where do we go next?  Here are several recent examples of our initiatives to align GSC-related resources towards the new focus on Human Security/Global Health:

Study abroad (Human Security/Global Health)

GSC’s new focus launched a tailored, round-the-world study initiative.  In August 2014, PittMAP (GSC’s global semester) set off to France, Morocco and China.  As Global Studies’ signature program, PittMAP was able to offer advanced skills and coursework in Human Rights/Security and Global Health, examining real-world issues of immigrant health disparities and human trafficking in a study-abroad environment. 

Endowment initiative (Human Security/Global Health)

The 2014-2015 Carl Malmberg Memorial Scholarship in African Studies was awarded to Ms. Lebohang Matela-Tale (Lesotho). Trained as a Gender and Social Support Coordinator with extensive experience in HIV-AIDS and gender-based violence, Ms. Matela-Tale worked with the FOCCISA Health and Gender Justice Network.  She is founder and president of the NGO Corridors of Hope Gender Association of Lesotho.

Administrative initiatives (Human Security/Global Health) 

This fall, GSC was selected to host the Peace Corps Campus Recruiting Office, a contractual arrangement renewable for up to four years. The recruiter is tasked with finding suitable Peace Corps volunteers from Pitt and local colleges and universities in Western Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia.

Publications (Human Security/Global Health)

Sustainable Development and Human Security in Africa: Governance as the Missing Link, edited by Louis A. Picard, Terry F. Buss, Taylor B. Seybolt, Macrina C. Lelei (CRC/ Taylor and Francis Press, May 2015).  This volume is the result of GSC’s Global Academic Partnership (GAP) conference, hosted by Pitt’s Ford Institute for Human Security.

Palestine-Israel in the Print News Media: Contending Discourses (Routledge, November 2014).  GSC’s UCIS Visiting Professor in Contemporary International Affairs Luke Peterson is author of this volume in the series Routledge Studies on the Arab-Israeli Conflict.  Underwritten with support from William Benter (Benter Foundation), 2014-15 UCIS Visiting Professor Luke Peterson (PhD Kings College Cambridge) offers courses on the US in the Middle East at both the undergraduate (History) and the graduate levels (GSPIA).  Dr. Peterson routinely provides commentary for local news outlets (NightTalk, WPIX; and The Chris Moore Show, KDKA).

As in the previous Spring 2014 Newsletter, where we focused on two distinctive features of Pitt GSC—its global study-abroad program (PittMAP) and its close collaboration with Pitt’s World History Center—we continue that effort here with the related thematic emphasis on Human Security/Global Health that runs through the articles that follow.

An inherent vulnerability of global studies centers is their devolvement into an “Et Cetera Center” for orphan projects without a better home.  We work hard to ensure we are not such a center. Our commitment to the coherence and intelligibility of our activities, as well as GSC’s distinction from the other seven federally-funded centers across the US, frames the articles in this issue.

Beyond this thematic unity, there is much else to be proud of.  In the past several months, for example, our GSC students have been the recipients of six major awards (National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship; Fulbright US Student Fellowship; two Critical Language Scholarships; a Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship; and a Princeton in Latin America Fellowship).  These and other “brag points” are part of a larger story about the ways in which we frame our available resources to continue a record of sustained global research and teaching.

I hope the pages that follow will contextualize our work. We welcome your interest and analysis that develop the Center’s mission and enhance intellectual debates on these key issues of global impact within the university community, across the region, nationally, and internationally. 

Cordially,

Prof. Nancy Condee, Director
Global Studies Center (NRC Title VI)
University Center for International Studies