Caroline Levander, vice president for Strategic Initiatives and Digital Education and English professor at Rice University, speaks to BYU faculty about Rice’s initiatives for integrating disciplines across campus.
PROVO, Utah (Oct. 10, 2014)—Integrating disciplines on college campuses is becoming more common across the United States, and at Rice University, Caroline Levander, vice president for Strategic Initiatives and Digital Education and English professor, is at the forefront. Levander is a recognized voice in transnational American studies, said Emron Esplin, from the English department, at a Humanities Center Colloquium on the campus of Brigham Young Univeristy.
Levander began the conversation with a brief history of her scholarly and administrative work.
Her first few books, Cradles of Liberty and Hemispheric American Studies, brought her to think about not only literature beyond the borders of a nation, but other practical questions: “What if you’re looking and asking from different disciplines,” said Levander.
She gave an example of a metro station in Berlin named “Onkel Toms Hütte” (“Uncle Tom’s Cabin”). Levander explained there was a man named Tom who owned a cafe. He decided to put an awning out back where people would sit and read Uncle Tom’s Cabin so the people called the area Tom’s Cabin. “From there, the idea crossed a number of built environments. This is an example of how fields of individual texts can travel,” said Levander.
She wrote another book that explores instances where American literature is found and why. But Levander said, “I was confident that the questions I had didn’t have answers on the page. So I started an archive project.” The archive, titled “Our Americas Archive Partnership,” is a collection of documents relating to the Americas.
As she and others began the archiving project, they struggled to figure out how to organize the information. They decided to organize the collections around concepts (such as colonialism, conquest, etc.) rather than chronologically. “It was a very interesting experiment,” she said. “It brought a lot of librarians into the mix.”
Then, she said, “There was a movement to rethink how we think of disciplinary knowledge.” Digital classes created an international reach for Rice and Levander wanted to encourage connections across disciplines. Rice will soon be breaking ground on a new interdisciplinary center for the arts. The building, explained Levander, will be devoted to art practitioners across campus, which will include digital classroom and media space and gallery space to view finished projects.
Levander shared her hope that the building will inspire a marrying of projects within the walls of the campus to the larger world. She gave an example of a class combining a photographer, artist and scientist to capture the beauty of the human body and use the images to educate K-12 children. “The project went to the schools,” said Levander.
“We wanted students to translate projects beyond the paper to something more valuable. Students want to leave college with a portfolio rather than grades they received,” said Levander. The new building and projects like these create opportunities for students.
Levander said that Rice’s campus initiatives are part of a larger movement across the nation for integrating disciplines within the university.
For more information on Levander and her work at Rice, visit her website.
—Stephanie Bahr Bentley (B.A. English ’14)