From the Acting Director

This is being an exciting year for me. Throughout my career in higher education, I have engaged in interdisciplinary collaboration and value the opportunity to lead the Center. I have had extensive discussions with my predecessors in this position, Professor Ken Waltzer (Director of Jewish Studies) and Professor Kathleen Geissler (WRAC Chairperson) and well understand the challenges of an acting director. I am grateful to the College of Arts and Letters to give me the opportunity to lead CIS-AH and help in making a smooth transition towards permanent leadership.

I work with students and dedicated faculty to better focus cooperative endeavors, clearly define goals, and assess results in order to improve efforts. I am an administrator with a spider web view. By spider web view –similarly to inter-net—I refer to the ways in which my specialized research agenda, my graduate and undergraduate teaching, my engagement to reach out community partners, my service to MSU as a participant in policy making and other initiatives to improve higher education while experiencing its constant transformations, are all interconnected. I will elaborate further in the spider web view later this semester. Meanwhile I invite faculty, students, advisers and administrators to take a look at CIS-AH new features, means of support, ongoing collaborations and initiatives.

New Website
I am glad to announce that we have redesigned our website and our web designers are working endlessly to transfer all information from the old site. In this process, we are reformulating its interface in order to better communicate all the resources that our Center is able to offer to IAH faculty and students (resources in the areas of research, teaching, community engagement, experiential learning, and collaboration). Please take your time to surf our website and find out about plenty of opportunities for support and collaboration.

Invitation
I invite IAH and MSU wide faculty, advisers and students to share ideas that may lead to collaborative projects in research, best teaching practices, active learning, community engagement and the place of liberal learning in today’s multicultural, diverse and global world.

Tokhapu Design – Inka Shirt

Other individual engagements
In addition to have been appointed Acting Director of the Center for Integrative Studies in the Arts and Humanities, this academic year I have received other honors and charges in the profession:

• Selected to the American Panel Fellowship of the American Association of University Women. I will serve the AAUW through December 2010.
• Elected to the MLA Executive Division of Colonial Latin America for five years (2008-2012)
• Invited as keynote speaker of Literature in the 11th Annual Ohio State University Symposium on Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literatures, Cultures, and Linguistics (April 18-19, 2008)
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• Think Tank grant to advance our work on "The Global Script of Indigenous Identities," a symposium with speakers from various institutions to be held October 29-31, 2008 in the MSU Union.
• Planning the 2008 Summer Institute for K-12 Teachers of Spanish at MSU. Last year we offered a similar institute for twenty five K-12 educators, http://www.educ.msu.edu/teachglobal/Americas/index.html. This work is possible thanks to a grant from Engaging the World initiative at MSU.