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.

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 2009.
• 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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Along with my colleagues Mindy Morgan (Anthropology) and Eduardo Guizar-Alvarez (Spanish and Portuguese), I have received a Think Tank grant to advance our work on "The Global Script of Indigenous Identities". With this grant we are planning a symposium with speakers from various institutions to be held October 29-31, 2008 in the MSU Union.
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In addition, I am also working with Kristin Janka-Millar, PhD candidate in the Department of Teacher Education, the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and my colleagues from the Spanish and Portuguese department, to offer 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, Teaching Hispanic Cultures of the Americas (Click Here for More Information). This work is possible thanks to a grant from Engaging the World initiative at MSU.