Historian Peter Mancall leads the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute.
Selma Holo reached out to museum colleagues in L.A. and around the globe to create the International Museum Institute.
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Joining Forces
From Casual Collaborations to
Independent Institutes, USC College Partnerships Foster Innovative
Scholarship and Expand Educational Opportunity
Besides bringing the best faculty to campus, USC College has found
another way to amplify its intellectual resources while zeroing in on
particular issues and opportunities: partnerships.
Joining forces with others, both within and outside of the university,
bolsters interdisciplinary teaching and research, enriches the student
experience and makes valuable contributions to the Southern California
region. As the fall 2005 semester began, a total of 50 such centers
were anchored in the College, linking the College with other USC
schools and institutions throughout Southern California, the nation and
the globe.
The partnerships range from simple collaborations among a few
professors in a USC department to partnerships among dozens of
professors in several USC schools and comprehensive regional and
national centers involving scores of universities and institutions.
Some of these partnerships bring distinguished new faculty to campus,
often in visiting or part-time roles, effectively growing the size of
the faculty to enhance competitiveness. Another effect is to stimulate
faculty recruitment, launch new graduate and undergraduate programs and
create new interdisciplinary centers and institutes.
“We recognized early in the formation of our strategic plan that
partnerships represent opportunities” said USC College Dean Joseph
Aoun. “They enable us to leverage our resources, introduce innovative
approaches into traditional fields and to bring together dissimilar
components that can generate exciting new fields. We were right on all
scores.”
Two new partnerships were formed with the Huntington Library in San
Marino. The Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West and the
USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute have attracted widespread
notice and independent funding. They give USC historians unparalleled
access to Huntington’s world-class archives, an arrangement that has
attracted an influx of curious scholars and yielded an outpouring of
original research.
“The Huntington’s phenomenal archive is tantalizing to scholars,” said
William Deverell, director of the Institute on California and the West
who joined the USC faculty as a professor of history following eight
years as a Caltech faculty member.
“The rare material, ranging from personal and business papers to
photographs, maps and government documents, is invaluable to people who
really want to understand the history of the western United States in
the last 250 years. With this partnership in place, my colleagues and I
believe we will be able to recruit the best and brightest graduate
students from around the country.”
Another innovative center is the new USC Institute for the
Neurolo-gical Study of Emotion and Creativity. Founded this fall by
neuroscientists Antonio and Hanna Damasio, the institute includes
economists, psychologists, teachers, doctors, musicians and film
producers.
“The Damasios were world famous and widely sought after,” said Aoun.
“They came here because we were able to present them with a diverse
interdisciplinary platform bringing neurosciences, the humanities,
social sciences, education, communication and cinema together as
partners.”
An entire new field has grown up in USC College over the past few years
and now, working with the Getty Research Institute, a graduate program
in the emerging area of the history and display of art collecting has
been established, led by art historian Malcolm Baker. Selma Holo,
professor of art history, leads the College’s new museum studies
program, which she has taken transnational, training museum directors
and curators from throughout the world in a program that also benefits
USC students.
“These are examples of many people from many parts of our faculty
sharing visions and then rolling up their sleeves to make them happen,”
said Aoun. “This will spawn similar ventures in areas both related and
unrelated, I predict.”
Within USC, the College has worked to overcome longstanding divisions
between fundamental and applied research, developing rich alliances
with USC’s professional schools, such as the Interdisciplinary Drug
Design Program, where graduate students from the College and the
pharmacy school work with chemists and pharmacologists to better
understand the interdisciplinary model of rational drug discovery that
is quickly becoming the norm in both industry and academia. Within USC,
joint centers have also been established to study the multidisciplinary
fields of high performance computing, international public diplomacy,
law and philosophy, and genomics, to name a few.
These inside-USC programs follow the examples set by two major
university-wide partnerships in the life sciences that have thrived
over the years, the Program in Biomedical and Biological Sciences
(PIBBS) and the USC Neuroscience Graduate Program, which is led by
College faculty. College scholars are instrumental in both
interdisciplinary training programs.
And then there’s the biggest of them all, the Southern California
Earthquake Center, a consortium of 15 core institutions with scientists
participating from an additional 54 institutions that is headquartered
in USC College. Federally funded, SCEC scientists study earthquakes in
Southern California, integrate new findings into a comprehensive and
predictive understanding of earthquake phenomena and communicate
results from their work to increase earthquake awareness, reduce
economic losses and save lives.
Plans for new centers are on the horizon. A few of the stand-outs are
an interdisciplinary center for the study of vision and an emerging
center, to be run by the Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies,
to study complexity and the simulation of microbial systems. Funds
raised through the Tradition & Innovation initiative will be
critical to the creation of new centers like these and the continued
success of existing partnerships, Aoun said.
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