Ray Fouché and Sharra Vostral
Please join me in congratulating Ray Fouché and Sharra Vostral on two recent achievements. Ray is an associate professor and director of the American Studies program in the School of Interdisciplinary Studies, and Sharra is an associate professor of history and an affiliate faculty member in American Studies.
In December 2015, Ray and Sharra gave the week-long seminar “Technology & Culture in Modern Societies” at the National University of Defense Technology, a Chinese university and military academy located in the city of Changsha. The seminar included a series of lectures on how cultural experience and expression can shape technology differently in diverse social contexts. The seminar was attended by faculty and graduate students in the university’s History and Philosophy of Science and Technology program.
In addition, Ray and Sharra have recently been awarded a $100,000 grant from Humanities Without Walls for their project “Collaborative Innovation and the Global Midwest: Inter-disciplinary Design and Envisioning Prairie Futures.” The project was selected for the consortium’s Grand Research Challenge: The Global Midwest, an effort to reveal and rethink the Midwest as a major force in this century’s global economy and culture for scholars, policymakers, government officials, social scientists, and the public. Ray and Sharra are joined in this project by Anita Say Chan and Michael Twidale of the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and Thomas Misa of the University of Minnesota.
Congratulations, Dr. Fouché and Dr. Vostral!
David A. Reingold
Justin S. Morrill Dean
College of Liberal Arts