History
To improve understanding of all facets of the US, then Prime Minister John Howard announced in 2006 the creation of a $25 million endowment to establish a United States Studies Centre. After a national competition administered by the New-York-based American Australian Association, the University of Sydney won the right to form the Centre in partnership with the AAA, with additional support from the NSW government and the private sector.
The Centre constituted its Board of Directors chaired by Malcolm Binks, AO and held its first National Summit on the Bush Presidency in 2007. The Centre admitted its first postgraduate students in its MA and PhD degrees in US Studies in early 2008. The remainder of 2008 saw the appointment of the Centre's founding CEO, Professor Geoffrey Garrett, its Chair in US Politics, Professor Margaret Levi, as well as the completion of the Centre's historic headquarters on the University of Sydney campus. In 2009, the Centre appointed journalist James Fallows as Chair in US Media, offered its first undergraduate unit of study on The US in the world, and formed a partnership with Harvard University to host the Centre's second National Summit on Sustainable Globalisation.
In 2009, the Centre hosted its first cohort of six postdoctoral fellows, chosen from 176 applicants. The fellows' work focuses on a variety of issues related to the United States, including cross-national comparisons of the role of religion, effects of increases in income inequality, the history of financial exchanges, U.S. and Arab-Israeli relations, Latino interest in education policy, and the history of sexual liberation in the 1970s U.S.
In the same year, the Centre appointed former Executive Director of Recovery Management for the City of New Orleans Edward Blakely as Honorary Professor in Urban Policy and former Australian Ambassador to the UN Robert Hill as Adjunct Professor in Sustainability.
In 2010 the Centre announced the $2 million Dow Sustainability Program, funded by the US-based Dow Chemical Company Foundation. The program will bring together academic and policy experts from Australia and the US to develop action-oriented solutions to a range of sustainability challenges concerning energy, water, food and biodiversity that are technologically innovative, commercially scalable and politically viable. Former Director of Pharmaceutical Research at Johnson & Johnson Susan Pond was appointed by the Centre as an Adjunct Professor working on the Dow Sustainability Program.
Bates Gill replaced Geoffrey Garrett as chief executive officer in October 2012.
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Idealism is the despot of thought, just as politics is the despot of will.”
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“Don’t give your opinions about Art and the Purpose of Life. They are of little interest and, anyway, you can’t express them. Don’t analyse yourself. Give the relevant facts and let your readers make their own judgments. Stick to your story. It is not the most important subject in history but it is one about which you are uniquely qualified to speak.”
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