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USIA Summer Institute
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USIA Summer Institute
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Background Information This Year's Participants
This Institute presents human migration along waterways as a key to understanding the cultural, political, and social development of the USA and the problems and rewards of a diverse society. Four waterways, representative but by no means all encompassing, provide the Institute's structure: the Atlantic, the Great Lakes, the Mississippi River, and the Pacific. Each waterway carried people---Indians, Europeans, Africans, and Asians---at first into North America and then to various points on the land. Those migrants created settlements as diverse as the ancient Mississippi city Cahokia, the Atlantic seaboard's plantations and colonial cities, the great lakefront cities like Chicago, and the late-twentieth-century multicultural metropolises like Los Angeles and New York. In moving along waterways and establishing themselves in North America, migrants, pioneers, laborers, and citizens created sites that were in various ways responses to their access to a river, lake, or sea. But also on waterways developed some of the salient features of American culture: the encounters among peoples of different races, ethnicities, and nationalities; the conflict between colonials and Europeans over the nature of political institutions; the initial Americanization of political institutions; the reform movements of the antebellum era; the growth of an industrial nation requiring that labor, raw materials, and finished goods move efficiently to and from factories; and the development of a nation that is at once increasingly urban, committed to political equality across ethnic, gender, and race lines, and itself the postindustrial leader of the global economy. Water has long been symbolic in American life, too, whether through baptism, or the retention of West African water spirits, or the "green" sense that uncorrupted nature is essential to the human spirit. Intended to assist international faculty by being representative and suggestive, not comprehensive, this Institute will range from social history issues like migration, mortality, and settlement, to cultural and political developments in constitutionalism, reform, religion, and literature, to late-twentieth-century challenges in education and civic life. In general, the Institute's organizers see it as adding to standard themes in American history an emphasis on the fundamental qualities of water and human movement and on the religious and artistic dimensions of migration, settlement, and nation-building in the USA. Vision and Purpose of the Summer Institute
Western Michigan University, a Carnegie classification Doctoral I institution with over 26,000 students, ranks among the 60 largest universities in the United States. Long a leader in teacher education, the University's College of Education is among the top two producers of professional educators in the nation. The six degree-granting colleges within the University offer 244 academic programs. More than 90 of these are at the graduate level, including 23 doctoral programs. A rapidly developing graduate-intensive, research-oriented public university, Western provides exceptional facilities for instruction and research. Within the past decade, more than $277 million has been spent on constructing new buildings and purchasing state-of-the-art equipment. Among these improvements are the new University Computing Center, remodeled and expanded library, a student recreation building, and cultural and performing arts facilities. The proposed summer institute will draw widely from the University's rich academic resources, especially the Programs in American Studies, Black Americana Studies, and Women's Studies; the Departments of English, History, Comparative Religion, Anthropology, Communication, Political Science, and Sociology; the College of Education; and the University Libraries. Participating Institution
The WMU Program in American Studies, founded in the 1970s, has long provided a major, enrolling a small number of students with exceptionally high grade point averages and plans for graduate professional education. Its director until 1999, Lewis H. Carlson, Professor of History, author of We Were Each Other's Prisoners: An Oral History of World War II American and German Prisoners of War (New York: Basic Books, 1997), offers the Institute expertise in popular culture and the twentieth century. In 1999, Katherine Joslin, Professor of English, was appointed director of American Studies at WMU. Newly affiliated faculty include specialists in early America, slavery, the nineteenth century, politics, material culture, environmental studies, religion, archaeology, women's studies, women's literature, African American literature, and sociology. These faculty members, several of whom hold doctorates in American Studies awarded in the 1980s and 1990s, are drawn from Anthropology, Comparative Religion, English, History, Political Science, Sociology, and Women's Studies. Moreover, the WMU Center for the Study of the Great Lakes offers an unparalleled forum for learning about migration into the Great Lakes region, the development of its waterways and economy, and contemporary problems of water use. Its director, Michael J. Chiarappa, Assistant Professor of History, experienced in public history and public education through museum exhibits and community organizations, offers the Institute expertise in the Great Lakes and in museums. The History of American Studies at WMU
Project Management
Katherine Joslin (seated, right), Brian Wilson (left), and John Saillant (center).
Katherine Joslin (Director) is a Professor of English and the Director of WMU's Program in American Studies. Her publications include Edith Wharton, a book in Macmillan's Women Writers Series, and Wretched Erotic: Essays on Edith Wharton in Europe, a book co-edited with Alan Price, as well as essays on Wharton, Willa Cather, Kate Chopin, Theodore Dreiser and other turn of-the-last-century writers. She is currently working on a book about Jane Addams, the settlement house founder, as a literary figure. A resident of Chicago before moving to Kalamazoo, Katherine received her Ph.D. from Northwestern University, where she blended the study of American literature and history. She is the mother of a teenager and relaxes by jogging and reading novels.
Dr. Howard Dooley, Executive Director of International Affairs, will serve as the Administrative Director for the Institute. He will be responsible for providing arrangements for facilities, housing, meals, and travel. Dr. Dooley will also take part in the pre-program briefing.
John Saillant (Co-director) is an Assistant Professor of English. His essays and reviews on the cultural and religious dimensions of migration in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries appear in about two dozen books and journals. Professor Saillant is one of the authors of a CD ROM textbook, Migration in Modern World History (Wadsworth Publishing 1999). Until recently he was a member of the editorial board of the Journal of History of Sexuality, and he recently joined a project based at Union Theological Seminary, African Americans and the Bible: An Interdisciplinary Research Project. All his degrees were awarded by Brown University in American Civilization. His interests include long-distance running and American music--blues, folk, and jazz.
Brian Wilson (Co-director) is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Religion, specializing in American religious history and theory and method in the academic study of religion. Currently, he is finishing a project entitled The New World's Jerusalems: The Role of Sacred Space in the Conquest and Colonization of the Americas, a systematic comparison of the use of sacred space in the European creation of New Spain and New England. In addition, Professor Wilson is investigating the religious implications of "Egyptomania" in the United States of the early 19th century. This project is part of his larger research program dealing with the history of Western Esotericism in America from the colonial period to the present. Professor Wilson is the author of Christianity (1999), co-author (with John Simmons) of Competing Visions of Paradise: The California Experience of 19th-Century Sectarianism (1993), and the co-editor (with Thomas Idinopulos) of What is Religion? Origins, Definitions & Explanations (1999). Professor Wilson received his Ph.D. in Religious Studies from University of California, Santa Barbara.
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