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Another FaCTS Mellon Project

Biography and Race in the Atlantic World: Thinking Across Disciplines Through Individual Lives

by Dr. Elizabeth S. Manley

This project seeks to expand a current Mellon-CUR funded Faculty Student Research Circle into an interdisciplinary course to be offered regularly at Xavier University. The Research Circle — Emergence of Race in the Transatlantic World: Biography as History — is a collaborative effort between faculty in the English and History Departments that engages students with "life writing" and the process of research and writing biographies that address race in the literary and historical imagination across the wide range of lived experiences in the Atlantic World. The resulting course would be offered next academic year and taught by myself and Dr. RobinRunia (English). While team-taught, the course would more importantly engage students in the act of thinking across and through disciplines as mandated by the FaCTS theme for the coming year. The course development plan proposes three central components: identifying readings that approach individual lives from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, planning course assignments and activities that engage students in thinking in the frame of these multiple perspectives, and constructing assessments that accurately measure students abilities to understand the core theoretical principles of biography, race, and the different disciplinary approaches we have engaged.

Start date: Wednesday, March 26, 2014
Finish date: Tuesday, March 31, 2015