The Arts Newsletter - 1 June

Dear staff and students

We have reason to be proud at Arts: On 27 May, Senior Associate Professor Lise Hannestad received the Rigmor and Carl Holst-Knudsen Award in recognition of forty years of excellent scholarship. On the same occasion, the Aarhus University Research Foundation (AUFF) awarded seven PhD prizes. Steffen Dalsgaard (Anthropology and Ethnography) and Jakob Ladegaard (Comparative Literature) from Arts were among the recipients of the AUFF prizes.

The position of director of the Centre for Teaching Development and Digital Media has been advertised internally at AU. The centre will spearhead educational research and development, including the incorporation of digital media in teaching. Our ambition is for the centre to achieve national and international prominence, so the centre director position is important. The new centre director must be a visionary with the drive to develop a strong research and teaching profile for the centre.   

The implementation committees which were tasked with developing proposals for the internal structure of our new faculty (three new departments and one department-like centre) have completed their reports. There is already considerable discussion about our future organisation, and I'm aware that many staff members at the departments and the former faculty secretariat are impatient. Administrative staff have been waiting for final clarification of their job responsibilities and location for quite some time. Academic staff want assurance that their teaching and research activities in their particular fields will receive the necessary support.  Students are naturally concerned about how their degree programmes will be affected by the new, large departments. For the entire senior management group of the faculty, including the Dean's Office and the department heads, ensuring that the ideas and opinions of both academic and administrative staff influence the development of the new structures is a high priority.

From my discussions with department heads, I'm aware that some academic staff members are worried that existing teaching and research specialisations will become less visible - or even disappear - in the new larger departmental structures.  To these staff members, I would like to say that the goal of the academic development process is to strengthen existing academic specialisations and disciplines as well as to create new opportunities for multidisciplinary cooperation. In fact, strong disciplines are a necessary precondition for this. At the same time, we must also establish structures which provide rich possibilities for cooperation, both in teaching and in research. We are convinced that the framework which has been established for the new departments will encourage these developments. Our disciplinary specialisations will influence both the organisation of our degree programmes and our research activities.  Researchers will be able to work together in the research programmes which best answer to their interests; they will also work together in teams with responsibility for degree programmes. For some, research cooperation will be based on the traditional disciplines, while for others, it will be multidisciplinary. What is important is that we produce the research results and degree programmes which best respond to the questions and problems our society poses, and which we pose ourselves as scholars and educators.  The academic development process has created a strong foundation for our work which will benefit both classical disciplines and multidisciplinary activity - in research, teaching, and knowledge exchange. Now it's up to you to discuss how we can construct effective, well-run departments on this foundation. I am looking forward to hearing your thoughts on our new departmental structure at the upcoming café seminars.

Calls for applications in connection with the new AU initiatives AU Ideas, which will support visionary project ideas, and Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies, which will give especially talented young researchers from all over the world an opportunity to work in a stimulating multidisciplinary context for a two to three-year period, will be published soon.

The calls for applications will be published before the summer holiday, and the application deadline will be in late August, so take note of this opportunity. AU Ideas in particular is intended to support AU research projects. The calls for applications will be published online and in UNIvers.

Four hundred staff members have signed up for the Arts preparty on 17 June, I'm pleased to announce. It would be delightful to see even more of you, so the deadline for sign-up has been extended to Sunday 5 June - sign up here!

Dean Mette Thunø

Arts

The Arts Newsletter will be sent to all staff and students at Arts until the summer holiday.  After the summer holiday, it will only be sent to subscribers. Subscribe to the Arts Newsletter here

More news from Arts:

> Director of Centre for Teaching Development and Digital Media

> Chief adviser job advertisement (in Danish)

> Lise Hannestad receives prestigious AU award
Throughout her forty years as a researchers, senior associate professor Lise Hannestad has been fascinated by meetings of cultures.  She has just received the Rigmor og Carl Holst-Knudsen Award in recognition of her work.
Read the full story in Danish

> Aarhus Universitets Forskningsfonds ph.d.-prisvindere 2011 (in Danish)

> Read more about the heads of departments at Arts

On Wednesday 25 May, the first four reports from the faculty's implementation committees were published on the Arts homepage  (in Danish). Summaries of the reports are being translated in to English, and these will be available on the faculty homepage by the middle of next week.