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Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies - Ford Foundation

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<strong>Inclusive</strong> <strong>Scholarship</strong>: <strong>Developing</strong> <strong>Black</strong> <strong>Studies</strong> in the United States 209<br />

listed courses,and restored relations with History,Government,and Foreign<br />

Affairs and other departments with which the Institute had ceased to interact.<br />

With “Changing Cultures of Race in the Modern World,” Butler’s<br />

leadership has “institutionalized a forum for the cross-disciplinary exchange<br />

of ideas among university faculty, graduate students, visiting scholars,<br />

and Woodson research fellows.” 34 The Race seminar discussed new<br />

scholarly approaches to race and gender on a level that has, according to<br />

Butler, “given scholarly discussions of race greater visibility.”<br />

With the College of Arts and Sciences providing two years of support<br />

for this seminar, Butler has been impressive in what he has accomplished in<br />

a very short time. He has rejuvenated and enriched the complex institutional<br />

environment of the Woodson Institute with its multi-tiered research<br />

and visiting scholar programs.<br />

Butler is fortunate to have a well-designed environment in which to<br />

support an extraordinary array of institutionalized research projects. They<br />

include the ongoing work research of doctoral candidates and postdoctoral<br />

fellows on African and African American subjects, and faculty research<br />

projects in History (“The Valley of the Shadow”), Anthropology, and other<br />

fields. The Woodson Institute directs work on the Venable Lane/Catherine<br />

Foster nineteenth-century African American family burial site (discovered<br />

on UVa property in 1993); the Holsinger Studio Photograph Research Project;<br />

“The Culture of Desegregation in the Upper South, 1940–1970”; and<br />

the Central Virginia Social History Project.<br />

Butler has strengthened existing projects and added a number of important<br />

new ones. In addition, the “Director and Assistant Director of the<br />

Woodson Institute serve as advisors to the Booker T. Washington National<br />

Monument in Franklin County, Virginia, and the Monticello/Thomas Jefferson<br />

Memorial <strong>Foundation</strong> in Charlottesville. The National Park Service<br />

has asked the Woodson Institute to cosponsor a conference on the Underground<br />

Railroad and Slave Resistance in the year 2000.” 35 A conference and<br />

edited volume on the Sally Hemings–Thomas Jefferson relationship were<br />

developed in the wake of the controversy on the findings on the genetic ev-

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