UB To Establish Center For The Americas

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- The University at Buffalo will establish a Center for the Americas as an interdisciplinary teaching and research center in the College of Arts and Sciences to expand the university's curriculum and degree options in the field of American studies.

The center will be headed by Mark Shechner, Ph.D., professor of English, who says the initiative will offer new and exciting opportunities for scholarly collaboration among faculty members from different departments and schools, and will strengthen and expand program options for students.

The university will dissolve the Department of American Studies and fold its programs into the Center for the Americas at the end of the 1999-2000 academic year.

The department offers degrees in American studies, Puerto Rican studies and Native-American studies.

"Those programs will continue," Shechner says, "and be supplemented by programs in Caribbean studies, Canadian studies, Latin-American studies, Latino/Latina Studies and others where we can identify substantial faculty expertise and student interest. This may sound breathlessly eclectic," says Shechner, "but we want to blur disciplinary boundaries while looking for underlying unities -- historical, demographic, economic -- between what seem on the surface to be discrete areas of knowledge."

The Center for the Americas will grant bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees in American or "Americas" studies. Most degree requirements will be program specific, although all programs will require degree candidates to take courses in at least two different disciplines.

"We are looking to educate generalist-specialists. That is, generalists who share certain common foundations of knowledge; specialists who can bring those foundations to bear on particular cultural, social and historical issues," Shechner says.

UB's Women's Studies Program -- one of the first in the United States -- was, until recently, housed in the Department of American Studies. It now is administered through the Institute for Research and Education on Women and Gender (IREWG).

"Since IREWG does not grant degrees," Shechner says, "we will extend to it the degree-granting programs of the Center for the Americas.

"We have several missions here," he explains. "One is to administer and enrich American Studies courses and programs with cross-listed courses taught by affiliate faculty. A second is to develop linkages between our programs and related ones in departments and schools around the campus. Another is to make it easier for faculty to identify potential colleagues outside their departments and inaugurate research initiatives and instructional programs from existing resources.

"There are many professors with mutual interests around the university who are unaware of each others' existence or their potentials for collaboration," Shechner notes.

Shechner says the Native American Studies Program will be reconstituted as a center for the study of indigenous peoples throughout the Western Hemisphere, while Puerto Rican studies will be linked to Caribbean and Latin American studies.

He points out that some of the aforementioned programs already exist in various arts and sciences departments. Programs in Latino/Latina studies and Caribbean studies, for instance, are in place in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures. Shechner says that these programs "will need elbow room to grow beyond departmental boundaries if they are to realize their maximum potentials."

He adds that while UB does not at this time have a formally constituted Canadian studies program, it does have a well-organized U.S.-Canada research and study group involving faculty from a wide range of disciplines.

"Association with the Center for the Americas might speed that group's achievement of program status," Shechner says.

"We live, after all, in a border town that has a unique relationship to Canada and its populations, including the Native-American nations. We have close historical ties and common concerns in the areas of economics, trade and the environment, particularly that of our shared waterways."

Shechner says he expects the global-local contexts of history, trade, populations and politics that define the Western New York region to be inscribed deeply into courses of study affiliated with the center.

He cautions, however, that the new center should not be viewed as just an assembly of multicultural or area programs. He calls such an assemblage just one model of many.

"We are interested largely in recontextualizing the process of inquiry," he says, "in introducing students and colleagues alike to new frames of reference."