Source: Getty
Voting rights: Martin Luther King leads demonstrators during the 1965 marches
This year marks the 50th anniversary of one of the turning points in the US civil rights movement: the Selma to Montgomery marches in support of voting rights for African Americans – epochal events recently celebrated in Ava DuVernay’s film Selma.
It is highly appropriate then that Queen’s University Belfast should this year join forces with Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee to launch its first “international module”, devoted to the civil rights movements in Northern Ireland and the American South.
Fifteen second-year undergraduate students of history or politics from Queen’s and 10 of their Vanderbilt counterparts are now spending a month together – two weeks in Nashville followed by two weeks in Belfast. For the Americans, the module is an optional self-contained course known as a “Maymester”. For the Queen’s contingent, selected on the strength of their results to date and a personal statement, it represents a standard unit of their degree.
Along with intensive teaching every weekday, participants will visit museums and heritage centres in Atlanta, Birmingham (Alabama), Memphis and Nashville, as well as Belfast and Derry/Londonderry, to explore how the events of a period stretching roughly from 1955 to 1972 are represented today.
The module will “identify the historical origins and contexts of the campaigns for political and legal equality for African Americans in the United States (principally in the southern states), and Catholics in Northern Ireland”. It will go on to consider themes such as “the role of gender, religion, nationalism, historical consciousness and political leadership in shaping each campaign”, “the nature and dynamics of ‘civil rights’ as a political concept” and “the tensions between non-violent and revolutionary elements”. It will also “address parallels, influences and discontinuities between the case studies, encouraging students to assess the nature and outcomes of both through a transnational perspective”.
A healthy precedent
Although the 10-year partnership between Queen’s and Vanderbilt has already yielded exchanges of staff and doctoral students, says Peter Gray, module coordinator and professor of modern Irish history at Queen’s, “this is the first time we have taken a cohort of students abroad” to study alongside their US peers – although he hopes it will set a precedent for similar initiatives.
Catherine Clinton, now Denman endowed professor of American history at the University of Texas at San Antonio, who was involved in developing the module in its early stages, still serves as an international research professor at Queen’s. She will be teaching a class on “women of the US civil rights movement” and accompanying the students on a bus ride from Nashville to Alabama that “replicates the civil rights experience”. She also points to the parallels and links between the two movements.
In Northern Ireland, she explains, protesters “consciously modelled themselves on the Americans and some key American figures went to lecture there”. Perhaps because of this, Queen’s “has a historic interest in the US civil rights movement”.
Well before the module got under way earlier this month, adds Clinton, “the students were already communicating on Facebook. None of the Northern Irish students has been to Nashville, so we sent them a New York Times video on ‘style in Nashville’.”
Those fighting for civil rights in Northern Ireland, agrees Gray, followed what was happening in the US, “particularly what they saw on television”. Although they were also influenced by the wider student protests taking place in Paris, Berlin, Berkeley and elsewhere in the late 1960s, “they saw an analogy with the southern states, which gave them a space for non-violent direct action that didn’t previously exist”.
Despite “some comparative work from the Northern Irish side”, Gray admits that the two civil rights movements have “mostly been studied in isolation”. Yet this is something that makes the module even more exciting. Students will be expected to get to grips with a wide range of primary sources. Those from Queen’s and Vanderbilt, often bringing with them some of the memories and mythologies of their different communities, will work together in small groups as part of the course’s reflective element.
If all goes well, Gray hopes that “students will start making comparisons for themselves” and that, over the longer term, the module “may spur more comparative research on the part of both staff and students”.
In numbers
54 –?the distance in miles between Selma and Montgomery walked by protesters in March 1965
Campus news
University of Strathclyde
Researchers at a university hope to launch a “leg bank” to provide prostheses for people on low incomes who have lost limbs. The initiative would draw on technology developed at the University of Strathclyde to manufacture sockets that fit prostheses to an individual’s residual limbs. In partnership with the Dutch social enterprise ProPortion, the researchers are seeking funds to launch the venture in Colombia, where landmines have killed or injured more than 10,000 people in the past 25 years.
University of Gloucestershire/Royal Agricultural University
A research institute has helped to create an organisation that will work to protect the UK’s upland areas. Academics from the Countryside and Community Research Institute, a partnership between the University of Gloucestershire, the Royal Agricultural University and Hartpury College, have been part of the formation of the Uplands Alliance, which will offer ideas and advice to policymakers, lessons in good practice and inspiration for farmers and landowners.
Soas, University of London
A food anthropology master’s programme has narrowly missed out on a top industry prize. The course at Soas, University of London reached the finals in the “Best Initiative in British Food” category at the 15th annual BBC Radio 4 Food and Farming Awards, which were announced in Bristol on 30 April. The MA, which examines the “plant to palate” journey of food, is the first university course to have been nominated for the awards. Judges praised it for critically analysing food policy at the national and international levels.
University of the Highlands and Islands
Academic courses and research partnerships could be delivered jointly by two universities covering sparsely populated areas on opposite sides of the world. The University of the Highlands and Islands has formed an alliance with Federation University, Australia’s newest 中国A片 institution. Both have a regional structure and offer further education as well as degree courses. In addition to joint programmes in common areas such as history and rural health, plans include staff and student exchanges, and sharing teaching materials.
University of East Anglia
What has been claimed to be the first academic conference on Disney’s animated film Frozen has been hosted by a university. The “symfrozium” was due to take place at the University of East Anglia on 12 May, with talks on topics from the representation of gender roles to the music used in the film. “Frozen was an immediate hit and has been a talking point among film lovers and academics ever since,” said Su Holmes, conference co-organiser and reader in UEA’s School of Art, Media and American Studies.
University of Essex
A university in the South East is making what it calls a “major investment” in academic staff. The University of Essex is creating 60 additional academic posts in the faculties of humanities, social sciences, and science and health. Vice-chancellor Anthony Forster claimed that it was “the most significant recruitment drive” in the institution’s 50-year history. “We want to attract outstanding scholars who share our values and are excited about offering a transformational educational experience to our students,” he said.
Queen Mary University of London
A British historian has uncovered the first confirmed image of Lenin’s first love. Robert Henderson, honorary research associate at Queen Mary University of London’s School of History, found the photo of Apollinariya Yakubova in Russia’s state archive as he researched a book on the Russian revolutionary Vladimir Burtsev. Lenin is said to have proposed to Yakubova when they both lived in St Petersburg in the 1890s but was rebuffed. Later, she was, like Lenin, sent to a Siberian prison camp for engaging in revolutionary activity.
University of Sussex
A new initiative that offers students funding to undertake an internship in China has been launched. The University of Sussex’s China Internship Scheme will initially offer 30 students ?2,500 towards living expenses for a four-week internship programme with employers in China’s major cities. Sussex hopes to raise the number of places on the scheme, which is open to undergraduates and postgraduates, to 300 by 2018.