United States Studies Centre - History

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.

Read more about this topic:  United States Studies Centre

Famous quotes containing the word history:

    The history of all countries shows that the working class exclusively by its own effort is able to develop only trade-union consciousness.
    Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870–1924)

    A great proportion of the inhabitants of the Cape are always thus abroad about their teaming on some ocean highway or other, and the history of one of their ordinary trips would cast the Argonautic expedition into the shade.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    You treat world history as a mathematician does mathematics, in which nothing but laws and formulas exist, no reality, no good and evil, no time, no yesterday, no tomorrow, nothing but an eternal, shallow, mathematical present.
    Hermann Hesse (1877–1962)