Imagining America:Artists and Scholars in Public Life

a roundtable discussion » Friday, April 13, 2:00 p.m., Buttrick 123Jan Cohen-Cruz is director of Imagining America and University Professor at Syracuse University. Prior to joining Imagining America in 2006, she taught at NYU Tisch School of the Arts. Cohen-Cruzrecently published Engaging Performance: Theater as Call and Response (Routledge). She is currently engaged in a project administered by the Bronx Museum and funded by the State Department involving community-based visual arts cultural diplomacy projects taking place in 15 countries around the world.

Teresa Mangum is a professor of English and director of the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Iowa. She is a member of the National Advisory Board of Imagining America. Mangum and Anne Valk of Brown University have just launched a book series, Humanities and Public Life, with the University of Iowa Press. She wrote Married, Middle-brow, and Militant: Sarah Grand and the New Woman Novel (University of Michigan Press). Mangum founded and co-directed the Obermann Graduate Institute on Engagement and the Academy.

Bill Ivey is director of the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy at Vanderbilt University. He serves as Senior Consultant to Leadership Music, a music industry professional development program, and is immediate Past-President of the American Folklore Society. Ivey recently published Arts, Inc.: How Greed and Neglect Have Destroyed Our Cultural Rights (University of California Press). From May, 1998 through September, 2001, he served as the seventh Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal cultural agency.

Vanderbilt University is a member of Imagining America, which is a consortium of 90 colleges and universities, and their partners, that emphasizes the possibilities of humanities, arts, and design in public scholarship. Public scholarship refers to diverse modes of creating and circulating knowledge for and with publics and communities. It often involves mutually-beneficial partnerships between higher education and organizations in the public and private sectors. Its goals include enriching research, creative activity, and public knowledge; enhancing curriculum, teaching and learning;preparing educated and engaged citizens; strengthening democratic values and civic responsibility; addressing and helping to solve critical social problems; and contributing to the public good.Image from “In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre Performance,” in the Imagining America photo archive on Flickr, adapted from a photo by Karen Trail-Johnsonposter by The Fortlander Agency