Administrators approved three new study abroad programs based in Europe, but eventually pulled the plug on one of them.
The programs slated to be offered to Duke students starting in summer 2013 include a new Paris program and a partnership program in Barcelona. The council also approved a new program in Tuscany, Italy, which has since been canceled.
Duke Neurohumanities in Paris—the product of collaboration between faculty in the Franklin Humanities Institute and the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences—will be a six-week program focusing on the intersection of neuroscience and the humanities. It will specifically look at the history of cognitive analysis through both disciplines. The program will run alongside the existing Duke in Paris, which focuses on French literature and culture.
“We wanted a curricular dimension to form an undergraduate cohort able to investigate neuroscience using humanistic questions and methodologies and vice versa,” said Deborah Jenson, director of the Neurohumanities in Paris program and a co-director of the Neurohumanities Research Group.
Neurohumanities in Paris will bring together four neuroscience professors and two Romance studies professors. The program is the brainchild of the Neurohumanities Research Group, which has been developing an interdisciplinary research community over the past two years, Jenson said.
Although some courses offered at Duke are cross-listed in both departments, Jenson said the Paris program would be unique in immersing faculty and students from both neuroscience and Romance studies in a joint educational enterprise.
The new Barcelona program will be a partnership between Duke and other institutions, said Steve Nowicki, dean and vice provost of undergraduate education. He noted that Duke was interested in participating in the collaboration because it will provide a new program in a Spanish-speaking country.
The Duke in Barcelona program is a consortium comprising mostly the Ivy Plus universities, he noted. That group set up a combined study program called the Consortium for Advanced Studies in Barcelona. The program will start Fall 2013 and will be operated by Brown University.
The program will also be approved by the Romance studies department, but the courses offered in Barcelona will be approved by the relevant departments, Margaret Riley, director of the Global Education Office for Undergraduates, wrote in an email Oct. 23.
“Students have been going to Barcelona in high numbers for years, so we were interested in providing a high quality Duke program in Barcelona,” Riley said.
Riley said the Duke in Tuscany program was eventually canceled because there were doubts about the potential popularity of the program.
The program was a partnership with the University of Wisconsin at Madison, which was would have administered the program, she said. They decided to not proceed with the program.
Nowicki added that since the partnering institution did not believe it could attract enough students to participate in the program, Duke—also unsure of its ability to attract students—decided not to run the program independently.
Clarification 10/30/2012: An earlier version of this article stated that Duke Neurohumanities in Paris was a joint program between the Franklin Humanities Institute and the neuroscience department. The article has been modified to reflect that the neuroscience program is part of the larger Duke Institute for Brain Sciences.
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