Professor Amar and the Orfalea Center Awarded Two Prestigious Grants

Award Recipient: 

Professor Paul Amar

Award Date: 

Thursday, September 3, 2020

Exciting news -- UCSB’s Orfalea Center for Global & International Studies has received a pair of major grants:  $240,000 ($200,000 of which is allocated for UCSB) from the Ford Foundation, and $175,000 from the Carnegie Corp. Read the full article here, and some highlights from Charlie Hale, SAGE Sara Miller McCune Dean of Social Sciences, below:

“In his first year as director of the Orfalea Center,” he said, “Professor Amar has provided effective, visionary leadership, building a robust, interdisciplinary intellectual community around key themes in global and area studies. Resounding external recognition of his leadership has come in the form of these major grants from two of the nation’s most prestigious foundations.

“With Amar at the helm,” Hale continued, “the Orfalea Center is making good on UC Santa Barbara’s longstanding commitment to become a truly global university. Our troubled world needs, now more than ever, the critically engaged understanding of global security and geopolitics that this research is poised to provide.”

The articles goes on to describle Professor Amar's collaboration with the Orfalea Consultative Council and reimagining the Orfalea Center:

Amar, who is also a professor in UCSB’s Department of Global Studies, was named the center’s director in July 2019. He credits the new Orfalea Consultative Council, which includes 30 scholars from the humanities and social sciences at UCSB, with breathing new life into the center. These scholars have worked to build dialogue between area-specific, transregional, ethnic studies and global research perspectives on campus.

“The focus of this council is to reimagine the center,” he said. “The council has been working to foster new kinds of research collaborations, particularly with publicly engaged researchers in areas of conflict or crisis in the global south and east.

“The good news is that the council has done an amazing job in helping shape that vision and developing new themes for the center to invest in,” Amar continued. “Grant-making foundations like Ford and Carnegie are similarly committed to funding new approaches to the ‘co-production of knowledge’ with unconventional publics and knowledge producers in the global south. This signals a tremendously exciting transformation.”

Congrats to Professor Amar and the Orfalea Center!