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Nanette Shaw
The Ford Foundation has awarded the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York a three-year, $890,000 grant to synthesize the foundation's ambitious Crossing Borders project in Area Studies. The project, Crossing Borders: Revitalizing Area Studies, was established in 1997 and represents an ambitious attempt to reorganize and reinvigorate Area Studies. Funding almost 100 new projects, Crossing Borders, seeks to continue deepening and broadening knowledge of specific places and areas, their cultures and languages, histories and geographies, politics, economics and social relations. It also raises the fundamental question of what constitutes an area in the first place and how specific knowledge derived in one context can be translated across geographical and disciplinary boundaries. The Graduate Center project, Revitalizing Area Studies: Toward a Synthesis, will draw together the new work accomplished under Crossing Borders. Headed by Professor Neil Smith, the project will produce a substantial volume spanning the scope of Area Studies revitalization. An eminent urban geographer, Professor Smith is Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at The Graduate Center and Distinguished Professor of Anthropology. Area Studies emerged after World War II as a means of generating scholarly knowledge about different parts of the world, and the Ford Foundation took a major role in funding this work. In four decades since the early 1950s, Ford committed $270 million to graduate and post-graduate research in the field. In the face of academic criticism and a dramatically changed world map as a result of decolonization, globalization, and the implosion of the eastern bloc after 1989, Ford decided that Area Studies needed to be it restructured in order to deal with new global realities. The Crossing Borders project offers a vital foundation for developing Area Studies in a new way. What constitutes a coherent area in the new global political and cultural economy has to be reconceptualized. "This is a very exciting opportunity for the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics, for the Graduate Center and for CUNY," said Professor Smith. "It gives us a leading role in a very closely watched scholarly endeavour - revitalizing Area Studies. We are all thrilled and ready for the challenge." Internally, the grant will bring in several postdoctoral researchers, provide fellowships for CUNY faculty and doctoral students, and, through a series of workshops and conferences, will bring an estimated 120 scholars to CUNY over the next three years. This work will have a multiplier effect in terms of new curricula and research initiatives across CUNY and will significantly enhance The Graduate Center's reputation as a center for international studies. Conferences will be open to the public. Established in 1961, The Graduate Center has grown to an enrollment of about 3,300 students in 32 doctoral programs and seven master's degree programs in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences. The Graduate Center also houses 30 research centers and institutes and administers the CUNY Baccalaureate Program. According to a recent National Research Council report, more than a third of The Graduate Center's rated programs rank among the nation's top 20 at public and private institutions, nearly a quarter are among the top ten when compared to publicly supported institutions alone, and more than half are among the top five programs at publicly supported institutions in the northeast. Further information on The Graduate Center's programs and activities can be found on its Web site at: www.gc.cuny.edu. The Seymour B. Durst Old York Library and Reading Room Seymour Durst began his collection in 1962 after visiting Paris, where he found a German edition of an elaborate photographic book about New York City in a bookstore window. Eventually, even the refrigerator in Durst’s townhouse was filled with books (he ate out). He had, in fact, moved twice to accommodate the ever-growing library. Durst assembled his library in a manner that would arouse both the envy and despair of the average librarian. It was organized by what he termed the "Durst Quintessimal System" and filled all but four of the 20 rooms in the house. Each room had a different theme and if a book fell into three different categories he would simply buy three copies, one for each related room. Some of the other rooms/categories include the Postcard & Guide Room, a kitchen closet reserved for NY Historical Society publications, the Art & Theatre Room, the Architecture Closet, the Commerce and Finance Room, the Biography Room, etc. The Reading Room at The Graduate Center reflects those categories of organization, and the furnishings include a rug, table, breakfront, and couches from Durst’s study, along with book cabinets built especially for the room. For research purposes, a database has been created that will be accessible online and will make it convenient to use the material. It may be accessed by going to the Old York Foundations website at www.oldyorklibrary.org. The thousands of items encompass such things as an invitation to the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge, which is referred to as "the East River Bridge;" bound editions of Harper’s Weekly from 1850 to 1915; Durst’s own favorite book, E.B. White’s Here is New York; The Bowery on Seventy-Five Cents a Day; an autographed copy of Theodore Dreiser’s My City; and numbered editions of Al Hirschfeld’s 1932 Manhattan Oases (199/200), featuring drawings of city speakeasy bartenders, and the artist’s 1941 depictions of Harlem (445/1000). Among the more rare books, though not directly related to New York City, is an original edition of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense with Paine’s own edits hand-written between the lines. (See press release for more examples.) # # # |