Register
If you haven’t already, register to start contributing news and events, and to search the Member Directory. Registration is free, but only open to current members of the American Studies Association.
Group Members
The following people are members of this group:
The following people are administrators of this group:
Member Tools
We're sorry. You are not yet a member of the International Committee.
Register or login to join this group.
MAIN | Reports | Contact
International Committee
Report from the International Committee 2006
Michael Frisch, Immediate Past Chair 2003-2006
September 15, 2006
As reported in April, The International Committee’s ongoing work is still best understood within the context of the International Initiative, for which a distinct report is being submitted.
Since our own mid-year report, the IC has focused primarily on assessing the Mellon grant applications and determining a priority list and proposed funding levels. The competition seems to have been stronger and more broadly based this year. A committee of IC member volunteers carefully considered applications from some 26 different countries, 54 applications in all, as International Initiative administrator Kate Delaney has reported. Through our direct funding and matching or at least token support for applicants funded mainly by international or home institutions concerned with fostering international participation, we have been able to provide support for more than 42 of the 54 applicants.
With this work completed, we have more recently been focused on plans for the International Initiative events at the upcoming Oakland meeting, especially the two “talkshop” sessions the IC developed as supplements to the formal program. Each “talkshop” offers a broad topic or issue in American Studies practice that we invite participants from around the world to discuss from the vantage of their own experience and setting.
Based broadly on a well-established EAAS format aimed at sustained discussion, the format begins with very brief frame-setting presentations by international panelists, each of whom will then facilitate parallel discussions, for the bulk of the session, among participants gathered at small round tables. Towards the end of the session, participants will come together as one group for discussion preceded by summary comments on each table’s dialogue by the facilitator or a selected rapporteur. For those interested, names and e-mails of table participants can be contributed and distributed electronically shortly after the meeting, providing a way to extend the networks and dialogue initiated in the talkshop
The first talkshop, developed and coordinated by Jane Desmond, Alfred Hornung, and Wieslaw Oleksy, will be on the topic “Teaching America in the 21st Century: How the U.S. presence, role, and image in the world shape American Studies Teaching”.
The second, developed and coordinated by Mary Chapman, Isabel Duran, Neil Foley, and Xiao-huang Yin, is on the topic “Alternative Affiliations: Beyond Citizenship, the Nation, and Inter-national American Studies “
In sum, we hope the International Initiative contributions to the Oakland meeting—including the International Partnerships luncheon event, the editors’ roundtable, the talkshops, and the general support of networking and informal communication—will help to consolidate and extend the impact of the significantly heightened international participation resulting from the Mellon funding. Beyond this important objective, as indicated in my report last year we see the International Initiative as advancing a more general appreciation of the many different functions the meeting can serve, beyond the formal program of sessions.
All this represents the culmination of several years of successful involvement in the internationalizing of the annual meeting, and to some extent the practice and sensibility of American Studies as a field.
While there can and should be considerable satisfaction at the transformative progress made, fully realizing the explicit intentions of the Mellon Foundation support, I conclude this report—my last as Chair of the International Committee, as my term of service has ended—by noting the importance of expanding the committee’s work well beyond the focus we have had on the annual meeting, important as that is.
We have discussed this on occasion, and been involved to some extent in such activities—for instance in the broadening and refinement of the international initiative’s web-resources that constitute such an important international access route for American Studies. But I believe it is time for the committee to play an even larger and more consistent role in shaping the direction of our field, intellectually and programmatically.
The landscape is very different than even five years ago, when I was privileged to serve ASA as President. I have much enjoyed the opportunity, through my subsequent service on the International Committee, to advance the International Initiative and to continue the broadened conception of how the annual meeting, beyond its immediate scholarly function, can also serve to consolidate and propel change in our community.
Today, internationalization is no longer a novelty, or the chosen emphasis of Shelley Fisher Fishkin’s Presidential term, or a focus propelled by a fortuitous and significant grant. It is now clear that in every sense, from the intellectual to the practical, American Studies is best understood as a field with international constituencies, international practice, and international responsibilities as well.
In this respect, I home the work of the last few years will come to be best understood as “transitional,“ or perhaps preparatory. With the momentum resulting from the Initiative’s impact on the annual meeting, and with a vastly expanded committee and a new Chair, Paul Lauter, whose active leadership role in international program development has been sustained over decades, I believed the IC is poised for a period of sustained work and creative leadership in dramatically new modes and directions.
I wish the members the best, I thank them and the ASA for the opportunity to serve as Chair, and I know I will much enjoy seeing how far and how significantly the work of the committee expands in the next few years.
Michael Frisch
Immediate Past Chair, ASA International Committee
September 15, 2006
Quick Links
American Quarterly [official journal site]
American Quarterly [editorial site]