PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — This month, 160 scholars from 55 countries, ranging from Brazil, Uzbekistan, Rwanda, Trinidad, China, Mozambique, Malaysia, South Africa and Nicaragua, will convene at Brown University for the inaugural Brown International Advanced Research Institutes (BIARI), a first-of-its-kind faculty development initiative for young faculty from emerging markets and the Global South. The annual series is the flagship program stemming from an agreement made official last year between Brown and the Santander Universities Global Division of Banco Santander, one of the world's top 10 banks and the largest bank in Spain.
Organized by academic field and addressing cutting-edge issues, BIARI offers a rising generation of the world’s academic leaders a distinctive international experience in Providence. Each institute is designed as a residential, intensive two-week workshop, organized as a mix of lectures, round tables, group work, field trips and social interactions. A team of recognized scholars in the field, from Brown and beyond, will lead each institute, along with world-renowned lecturers and speakers who have been invited to participate. Both formally and informally, young scholars will have an unprecedented opportunity to share their intellectual projects with peers as well as established faculty. Scholars from the Global South, selected through a competitive process from a field of almost 400 applicants, are participating at essentially no cost.
“Our BIARI initiative responds to the needs of a rising generation of scholars from around the globe,” David Kennedy, vice president for international affairs, has said. “Scholars from the Global South face particular challenges participating in the international academic conversation. We’re proud to make Brown the hub for these new academic collaborations.”
Participants and faculty for the first two institutes, “Towards a Global Humanities: Critical Traditions from the Global South” and “Development and Inequality in the Global South,” arrived on the Brown campus Sunday, May 31, 2009.
“As the participants and faculty members streamed in throughout the day and assembled for the first time at dinner, the diversity of the group was impossible to ignore,” said Ileana Porras, director of BIARI in the Office of International Affairs and visiting professor at the Watson Institute for International Studies. “The immediacy with which this diverse group of people took to one another and began the process of building a fruitful, engaged, and seemingly sustainable community of peers has been thrilling to watch.”
On Sunday, June 7, 2009, Brown welcomes the 70 new participants and faculty for the third Institute, “Law, Social Thought and Global Governance.” Brown University and Santander will host a welcome reception for all three Institutes. The reception will be followed with a performance by Marc Bamuthi Joseph, a National Poetry Slam champion, Broadway veteran, and inaugural recipient of the United States Artists Rockefeller Fellowship. Then, on Sunday, June 14, 2009, as the first two Institutes complete their two-week program, Brown will welcome the fourth institute, “Technology, Entrepreneurship and Management.”
“The BIARI experience is unparalleled in the academic community in the way that it seeks out and gathers together scholars in the early stages of their academic careers, supports their intellectual projects, fosters the intellectual connections among them and provides them with the tools and networks they need to return to their home institutions in the Global South,” Porras said.
For more information, visit: www.brown.edu/biari