Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies - Ford Foundation
Inclusive Scholarship: Developing Black Studies - Ford Foundation
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-