The Duke spirit
A group of Jacobs University PhD students (from Research Center VisComX) has started a six-month stay at Duke University in North Carolina as part of a new collaborative graduate education program. Four of the five graduates have already arrived at Duke University in Durham, one of the leading higher education institutions in the US. The last one is to follow in January.
December 13, 2011Florian Wiencek, Mastewal Adane Mellese, Sabine Neumann, Lena Merhej (pictured) and Ronak Etemadpour are taking part in a new international graduate education program in visual studies and humanities, a collaboration between Duke University’s Department of Art, Art History and Visual Studies and Jacobs University’s VisComX Research Center.
Having spent almost a month in the US now, the Jacobs students are very much enjoying their new experience in a different teaching-learning environment and have been included in various activities.
In a post on the Duke University website they said: “We have been at diverse lecture series events such as the ‘Visualization Friday’ or the ‘Intermezzo’, organized by PhD students of Art History, and more informal exchanges of ideas such as the ‘Rendez Vous’, where each week different people give insight to their work or bring up an interesting topic to discuss.”
The Jacobs students have also taken part in work group meetings (e.g. Greater Than Games Lab) and student presentations. “We have been involved in the jury of Caroline Bruzelius’ class on medieval cathedrals and participated in project presentations of the Master of Fine Arts in Experimental and Documentary Arts.”
The graduate education program is the result of a long-term cooperation between Duke University’s Department of Art, Art History and Visual Studies and Jacobs University’s VisComX Research Center. Over a period of four years it is funded by a $500,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The program will integrate existing projects into a larger international network of scholars, and simultaneously develop new graduate teaching and research programs at Duke University and universities in Bremen, Lille and Venice.
To set up the collaboration Jacobs University’s Prof. Marion Müller, Prof. Lars Linsen, Prof. Arvid Kappas, Prof. Adalbert Wilhelm (as members of the ‘VisComX Steering Committee’) and Prof. Isabel Wünsche, Prof. Otthein Herzog visited Duke University over the last couple of years and also welcomed their counterparts from the US institution on the Jacobs campus.
Prof. Linsen says about the joint program: „At VisComX we combine four disciplines – communication science, computer sciences, psychology and art history, which is a rare blend. Duke University’s Art Department very much complements our transdisciplinary approach and therefore makes for an ideal exchange environment.”
About VisComX
The Research Center VisComX provides both a platform for international scholarly communication and exchange and the organizational resources for conducting cutting-edge collaborative research as well as transdisciplinary postgraduate education.
It is the Research Center’s intention to further transdisciplinary research and knowledge on visual communication and expertise, to contribute to the dissemination of this knowledge and to improve and enhance its application as well as to provide excellent training and education for the next generations of visual scholars. More info: www.jacobs-university.de/viscomx
