The Center for International Studies

For more information, please visit our home page at http://internationalstudies.uchicago.edu

Director

Kathleen Morrison

The Center for International Studies, which coordinates and supervises the University of Chicago's international programs, has grown out of the University's six decade-long involvement in the study of international phenomena. This involvement began in the 1930s, when the first Committee on International Relations ever created in the United States was established at the University of Chicago. In the 1950s and 1960s, University faculty responded to international upheavals resulting from the World Wars by launching area studies centers.

These centers provided an innovative approach to the study of "other" cultures that became the model for universities throughout the United States. Today, the University of Chicago is home to five area studies centers--the Center for East Asian Studies, the Center for East European and Russian/Eurasian Studies, the Center for Latin American Studies, the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, and the South Asia Language and Area Center.

The Center for International Studies promotes collaboration between the five area studies centers through organizing educational outreach efforts and scholarly conferences and through encouraging curricular innovation. At the same time, the Center for International Studies is at the heart of a multidisciplinary and interregional discussion about the nature of "area studies" and the need for new tools to analyze international situations in the aftermath of the Cold War.

Programs of Study

The Center for International Studies collaborates closely with the Committee on International Relations, which offers an A.M. degree and a joint A.B./A.M. program. The Center is involved as well in the two-course sequence sponsored by the Council for Advanced Studies in Peace and International Cooperation (CASPIC).

Interdisciplinary Initiatives

The Transnationalism Project _http://transnationalism.uchicago.edu_has recently joined the CIS. Transnational flows of capital, people, information and images are transforming our worlds- they are also challenging researchers to develop new theoretical and methodological practices to study and account for them. The Transnationalism Project takes on this challenge. An interdisciplinary research group of faculty and students under the direction of Saskia Sassen, Ralph Lewis Professor of Sociology, the TNP aims to foster collaborative and innovative research into these dynamics through the development of new theoretical perspectives and methodological frameworks. Toward this end, the TNP provides several forums -- workshops, an annual conference, and informal discussion groups -- for junior scholars studying transnational flows and processes.

The Center for International Studies houses the University's Human Rights Program, which was established by an interdisciplinary group of faculty in 1997. The program's mission is twofold: to direct research and teaching to the development of new approaches to human rights and to collaborate with practitioners to reconceptualize human rights activism.

The Human Rights Program offers a three-course core sequence, open to undergraduate and graduate students, that covers the philosophy and history of human rights as well as contemporary issues in the field. Students interested in human rights can also enroll in a variety of additional courses offered by a number of departments. The program offers internships in human rights organizations, both in the U.S. and abroad.

On-campus Collaboration

Thanks to the acknowledged eminence of its international faculty in the social sciences, humanities, business, and law--and to the vitality of the University's own intellectual culture--there is a rich, collaborative environment in international studies at the University of Chicago. The Center for International Studies is perfectly situated to develop new modes of collaboration between disciplines and between those who study different regions of the world.

This text was last revised on 2/27/2003.