University Collaborations

The Department of English collaborates with a wide range of University of Minnesota departments and programs on course offerings, events, graduate student committees, and research. Our professors serve as core or associated graduate faculty, directors of graduate studies, or chairs in departments such as African American and African Studies , American Studies, Asian American Studies, Chicano Studies, Classical and Near Eastern Studies, Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies , and Writing Studies. In addition, faculty, staff, and students work regularly with the following interdisciplinary University centers and institutes, which sponsor extra-departmental focus groups and symposia.

Center for Austrian Studies

The Center for Austrian Studies serves as a focal point in the United States for the study of Austria and Central European lands with a common Habsburg heritage across disciplines in the humanities, the social sciences, the applied sciences, and the fine arts. It analyzes Austrian perspectives as a powerful tool for understanding the new Europe in the age of the European Union and it connects scholars, students, and an international community to resources in Austria, Central Europe, the EU, and Minnesota. Finally the Center for Austrian Studies reaches out to a local, national, and international community of educated nonacademics, bringing an awareness of Austria and the new Europe and its relevance to American life.

Center for Jewish Studies

The Center for Jewish Studies is dedicated to fostering a deeper understanding of Jewish culture and history. It provides: a vibrant resource of interdisciplinary studies for leading scholars on language, literature, culture, history, and social experience involving Jewish people across centuries and around the world; education that engages students in a rich interdisciplinary curriculum, spanning Jewish history, literature, languages, and culture; and a bridge that extends into the larger metropolitan Twin Cities community through events and cultural activities.

Center for Medieval Studies

The Center for Medieval Studies was established by the College of Liberal Arts in 1983. Its mission is to encourage collegial interaction and scholarly collaboration among faculty and graduate students in all areas of Medieval Studies through biennial conferences, colloquia, informal workshops, and courses at the graduate and undergraduate level. Participating programs include English, History, Paleography, Music, Classics, German, Archaeology, and Anthropology.

Center for Writing

The Center for Writing works to enhance student learning, to improve writing instruction, and to deepen our understanding of literacy and the writing process. Through individual consultations, workshops, and research grants, the Center for Writing supports the work of all University of Minnesota students, faculty, and staff engaged in the practice, teaching, and study of writing. The Center for Writing was formed in July 2003 as the merger of two separate units within the College of Liberal Arts: the Student Writing Center and the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies of Writing. The Center for Writing supports the University's mission to improve writing across the curriculum in a more comprehensive way: it works directly with students learning to write, supports instructors integrating writing into their courses, and sponsors research into the theories and practices of writing, rhetoric and literacy.

Institute for Advanced Study

The Institute for Advanced Study seeks to ignite creative, innovative, and profound research and discovery in the sciences, humanities, and arts. It provides a physical space at the Nolte Center where artists, scientists, and scholars can engage in and share their work. It convenes an annual symposium that catalyzes conversations across the University of Minnesota and that highlights the most innovative research initiatives that exist in the United States and the world. And it supports faculty fellowships and research collaborative programs that bring together artists, scientists, and scholars from across and beyond the University. English professors have been involved in such collaborative programs as Art As Knowing, which engaged in conversation about artistic practice and ways of knowing, and Global Sexualities: Transgressing National and Disciplinary Boundaries, which broke ground in the understanding of sexualities in a comparative and historical perspective. The ten research and creative collaboration groups chosen for 2007-08 support include three convened in part by English faculty:

The Film Collaborative seeks to foster the research and creative work of its members, which is a coalition of scholars, critics, artists, and filmmaking professionals devoted to the appreciation, study, research, and practice of cinema. Its aim is to create an environment within which cinema can be valued and recognized as a strong disciplinary partner, with its own historical paths and techno-artistic know-how.
The Performance and Social Justice Collaborative is a research-creative collaborative mobilizing the intersection between social justice work and performance. The collaborative will create Pipaashaa, extreme thirst, a project exploring the impact of environmental degradation in the lives of communities of color across the divides of North and South.
The Poetix Collaborative is dedicated to the cross-cultural study of poetics and poetry and to performing poetic works for campus and non-campus communities alike. Foremost among its multiple aims is to encourage scholarly exchanges on poetics across disciplinary divides and institutions, to make poetry more visible, viable, and embodied, and to establish links with locally, nationally, and globally practicing poets and poetics scholars.

Institute of Global Studies

The Institute of Global Studies supports research and scholarship, putting great minds to work on issues of global significance. IGS is the home of a range of interdisciplinary centers that support research and programmatic development. These include National Resource Centers in international studies, Western European Studies, and the study of the Asias. Working groups, intellectual collectives, and research collaboratives allow faculty to explore cutting-edge scholarship and to share research in progress. Speaker series and colloquia bring leading scholars to campus to interact with Minnesota faculty and students. The Institute for Global Studies (IGS) houses a graduate minor in Human Rights. Among the IGS centers and intellectual collectives with which English faculty are/have been involved are:

The Middle East and US Foreign Policy : Alternative Voices Speaker Series
The Space and Place Collaborativeis a translocal intellectual and creative collaborative founded in 1999 which bridges the methods, concerns, theories and practices of the Humanities, Fine and Performing Arts, and Social Sciences. Members understand space and place as broad and mobile concepts that are not easily fixed or fixable within existing disciplinary, artistic, geographic and temporal boundaries. The collaborative's creative and intellectual explorations of these concepts move between and across institutional frames to redefine the practices, performances and representations of interdisciplinarity. Their forum is therefore multi-modal and process-driven, shaped by an international membership and grounded in feminist politics and practices.
The South Asian Seminar Series convenes a series of lectures on themes and topics related to South Asia. The series is co-sponsored by the Department of Asian Languages and Literatures.