Scholarship and Research

 

The Annual President’s Conference, launched in spring 2003, is an integral part of each graduating class's commencement exercises at The American University of Paris. The conference aims to associate a high level of scholarship with the honor of receiving a degree from AUP, and thus serve as a reminder to graduating students that their intellectual development should continue throughout their lives.

 

The President’s Conference is sponsored by the AUP Board of Trustees and the A.W. Mellon Foundation.

 

 

 

 

The AUP Working Paper Series — scholarly workshops in various fields of the social sciences — provides a meeting ground whereby the AUP Community, local scholars, intellectuals, and business and government organizations, can convene with visiting international scholars. The lecture series has been created to stimulate debate and exchange upon critical contemporary issues, such as migration and immigration, environmental sustainability, and a range of public policy and social science research questions.

 

The Working Paper Series is sponsored by the AUP Board of Trustees.

 

 

 

 

 

The Division of Arts and Sciences (DAS), comprised of the largest number of departments and faculty members, has a vibrant faculty body that has produced substantial research within and across disciplines.

Within the Department of Art History faculty members have explored 17th and 18th centuries art (Baltay), the role of women in the Renaissance (Chevalier), and the sacred and secular representations in Medieval Art (Russakoff).  

The Department of Comparative Literature and English has established itself as a center of excellence in translation with individual faculty also developing a wide research agenda including, for example, the relations between literature and culture (Gilbert), early-modern French literature, voyages of discovery, language pedagogy (Mott, Rast), creative production (Craven), American nineteenth-century literature and American twentieth-century fiction (Dow), psychoanalysis, Marxism, critical theory, and the history of metaphysics (Feltham), twentieth-century European literature, e.g. the work of Marcel Proust and Samuel Beckett (Gunn), language and identity (Harding), law, jurisprudence, legal theory and discourse (Lincoln), women’s history and gender studies (Martz), fiction and autobiography (Picard), Linguistics (Rast), Romance languages (Rosenstein), interaction of knowledge and imagination, most particularly in science and literature (Safir), and classics (Wildberger). 

The Department of Computer Science, Mathematics, and Science has, through its Technology and Cognition Lab established long term collaborations with many renown universities and research institutions and has received support from a variety of funding agencies, notably the European Commission, with substantial grants allocated to AUP in international cooperative projects. Members of the department specialise in research topics including pure mathematics (Corran), linear programming (Derhy), biology, software engineering (Gentchev), robotics (Stojanov), and human computer interaction (Roda). 

Scholars within the Department of History are internationally recognised in the fields of urban culture and urban political history (Sawyer), European History (Englund, Murphy), and history of science, technology, and human values (Murphy).

A variety of research activities are undertaken in the Department of French Studies and Modern Languages with particular emphasis on language pedagogy (e.g. Attal, Bloomfield, Mougel, Taieb). 

The fast developing Department of Psychology is gaining international recognition in the field of social psychology with particular emphasis on social and cultural dynamics of identity formation (Schiff), individual's connection to collective memory (Schiff), psychology and medicine with focus on the representation of sexuality and emergent illnesses (Levinson). Other established areas of research include clinical psychology (Allyn, McCarthy).  

The vast majority of division research takes the traditional form of journal publications, conference papers, academic monographs, and collaborative volumes. Some of these publications have won prestigious international awards, such as Steven Englund’s work on Napoleon and Richard Pevear’s translations from Tolstoy. Faculty members in the division regularly organize, and present their work at, international conferences, workshops, and seminars; many have served as invited or keynote speakers. Many division members are very actively involved in their research communities serving as editors, reviewers, or committee members for internationally renowned journals, conferences, and academic organizations; they also regularly organize lecture and film series aligned with course materials or issues of curricular concern. A number of DAS faculty members have stable partnerships with prominent research institutions and universities in Europe, the U.S., and the world. Traditional research is also accompanied by substantial individual creative production (fiction, poetry, fine arts), literary and academic translation, and speechwriting. Faculty members in the division are responsible for very active research structures, such as the Center for Writers and Translators, the Arts Arena, the AUP Fine Arts Gallery, and the Technology and Cognition Lab.

 

 

 

The Division of Global Communications and Film accomplishes extensive scholarly research in the form of traditional books and articles, as well as in the form of creative production, translation, and journalism and media appearances.
 

The Department of Global Communications houses nine full-time and eight part-time teacher/scholars working in communications, cultural studies, cultural policy, anthropology, media studies, and film. In the past two academic years, the Department of Global Communications has produced 16 refereed journal articles and 14 book chapters in edited academic books, two single-authored monographs, three co-authored books, three edited or co-edited books, four book-length translations, and an edited journal.

The quality and impact of departmental research is notable, beginning with its significant profile in cultural policy and in cultural studies. Yudhishthir Raj Isar has now co-edited three volumes of The Cultures and Globalization Series (Sage): The Cultural Economy, Conflicts and Tensions, and Cultural Expression, Creativity, and Innovation. These volumes are considered works of reference in cultural policy and cultural studies and contribute considerably to the University’s reputation and renown. Julie Thomas, Mark Hayward, Jayson Harsin, Robert Payne, and Youna Kim have all published widely in noted journals or books in the field of cultural studies. The department has also been productive in the area of visual culture, publishing important work on culture and color, the history of photography, global cities and the built environment, exhibitions, ethnic representations in film, and postcolonial questions occasioned by the law and by the collection of cultural materials in museums. In the realm of media studies, department members have been especially active, publishing on Asian women and media, media and belief, social media, social networking, television, format transfer advertising analysis, and political branding. In anthropology, AUP scholars have made noted documentaries, and published extensively on the social meanings of food. The department regularly organizes international conferences on media and culture, belief, and fashion and political branding, having co-hosted such meetings with Goldsmiths, NYU, Northwestern and Duke University. Virtually all members of the department make media appearances, and several, such as Jim Bittermann and George Kazolias also produce television news on a regular basis.
 

The Department of Film Studies has a distinguished record of scholarly research and film production as well, including books on noted filmmakers, such as Kazan, Allen, and Visconti, radio documentaries on Proust, studies of Shakespeare and film, books on photography, original screenplays and several series of film documentaries, ranging from one on poets and writers to one on biology and cosmology. Members of the department regularly make films, direct films, produce films, edit films, and publish scholarly analyses of films and directors. The department organizes annual Master Class events with renowned filmmakers and actors, such as Arthur Penn, James Gray, James Ivory, Amos Gitai, and Fanny Ardant, as well as an ongoing lecture series featuring film producers.

 

 

 

 

Faculty in the Division of International Politics, Economics and Public Policy (IPEPP) have been engaged in research on some of the most pressing issues of our time and have sought to bring their scholarly reflections to a broad international audience of academics and policymakers. Faculty members regularly disseminate their work in peer-reviewed journals, in university presses, at international conferences, in trenchant online blogs, and on television and radio. IPEPP professors have sponsored seven of the eight annual AUP President’s Conferences and three faculty members have recently published seminal works with leading academic presses. The Working Paper Series in the Social Sciences, housed in the division’s Research Center, has brought dozens of scholars to campus to present complementary research in the social sciences.

 

The Master’s Program in International Affairs, Conflict Resolution and Civil Society Development (MAIA), has grown out of a series of publications on the impact of the fall of the Berlin wall (Gardner, Kobtzeff, Newton), on NATO enlargement (Gardner), on state formation after conflict (Ekovich, Gardner, Perry), on resource conflict in developing nations (Perry, Yates) and on regional and international governance (all faculty).

 

The Masters in Public Policy and International Affairs (MPPA) continues its focus on immigration and migration and sustainable energy (Beardsworth, Gardner), in addition to cutting edge research in public finance and the political economy of financial regulation (Dorsch, Hägel) and the political economy of economic systems, class, gender, and macroeconomic performance (Nomani). IPEPP faculty has examined the role of democracy as a governance structure (Beardsworth, Ekovich, Hägel), the integration of new populations in Europe (Perry) and the impact of human rights discourse globally (Barnsley, Perry). Finally, IPEPP faculty has explored issues such as religion, politics and the supernatural in Iran (Rahnema), as well as ethics, trust and governance in organizational structures (Alijani).

 

The division’s research agenda is very much influenced by the interdisciplinary conversations that occur across the AUP urban campus and in the demographically diverse AUP classroom. IPEPP faculty members seek colleagues and institutional partners committed to fostering peace and social justice through research.

 

 

 

 

The Division of International Business Administration—which housed only four full-time faculty members in 2008-2009, as it has recently lost several faculty and is preparing to hire new members—produces diverse, varied, and interesting research. Full-time faculty members have contributed chapters soon to be published on “Managing in a Global Environment” and “Mergers and Acquisitions” (in Management Through Collaboration: Teaming in a Networked World), as well as on “B2C E-Commerce Business Models” (in The Handbook of Technology Management). An analysis of quality in business education, presented at the Academy of Management’s annual conference in 2009, was recently published in the International Journal of Management Education.

 

Over the past three years, IBA full-time faculty members have published articles about the relationship of payout and asymmetric information, microstructure and institutional holdings, leveraging student learning styles, the technology acceptance model, and student satisfaction and performance in on-line as compared to face-to-face courses. These articles were published in: the Journal of Applied Finance, the Journal of Money, Investment and Banking, Applied Economics Letters, the Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges, Computers in Human Behavior, and the Journal of Computer Information Systems.

 

A conference presentation on assessment of student learning was given at the AACSB International Conference/Annual Meeting in 2007 and full-day, pre-conference workshops on the same topic were delivered at the ACM Special Interest Group for IT Education in 2005 and 2006.

 

Visiting faculty who teach in the division’s newly developed Master’s in Cross-Cultural and Sustainable and Business are extremely prolific, and have recently published articles in the following journals, to name just a few: Journal of Cross-Cultural Management, Journal of Business Strategy, Journal of Business Ethics, New England Journal of Entrepreneurship, Journal of Corporate Citizenship, International Journal of Business Innovation and Research, Southern Law Journal, and Midwest Law Review.