The Center for Ideas and Society is pleased to announce that Jeanette Kohl (History of Art) and Dylan Rodríguez (Media & Cultural Studies) have been appointed as co-directors. This innovative and ground-breaking partnership will draw on their combined visions, strengths and experiences to develop new projects and opportunities for the UC Riverside campus. Special thanks to interim Dean Juliet McMullin, Dean Daryle Williams, and all the faculty, students and staff who contributed to the search.
“To embrace the privilege of this co-directorship is to accept the responsibility of sustained, rigorous, active engagement with the conflicts, innovations and massive questions shaping this historical moment. The terms and conditions of academic scholarship are being radically confronted and constructively disrupted by a range of intellectual and scholarly movements as well as emerging creative and artistic insurgencies. Within this tension and irruption, the Center for Ideas and Society is an invitation to a build decolonizing collegiality, feminist fellowship, queer interdisciplinarity, Black study, and many other projects still to be thought, honored and created. My aspiration is to be your co-conspirator, co-planner and creative collaborator rather than a mere co-director. I invite you to inhabit this moment of disruption, transformation, danger and still unknown possibility with the Center at your disposal.”
“We stand at a crossroads, and it is with tremendous excitement about the experiment of a co-directorship in CIS that I am looking forward to many inspiring collaborations and celebrations will all of you. I bring to this position a vision that is based on three main pillars: an interest in intellectual history and in innovative projects that integrate deep and critical interdisciplinarity to incubate new research directions and help pave new ways in graduate education; the internationalization of the Center’s projects, fellows, and guests – which means connecting our students and faculty with the world and bringing outside views to the Inland Empire; and an emphasis on human integrity and inclusion, with a particular eye on the Center’s role as a place that fosters diversity and equality on all levels and in a broad array of constellations. The current planetary crises have served as a powerful reminder that we need to rethink our traditional academic and social strategies to find sustainable solutions, work together, and concentrate on our shared humanity in times of increasing rifts in our societies. As co-director, I am here to listen and support while we forge networks, think about novel forms of cross-disciplinary and transnational dialogue, and continue to build an open and respectful discussion culture together. Together, we have the unique chance to collaboratively reinvent the Center as an intellectual and social powerhouse that leads by example and moves the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences right into the heart of the university.”