Associate Professor of History and Coordinator of the Museum Studies Program Kenneth Cohen has been selected for a Fulbright Grant for the 2015-16 academic year. Professor Cohen will teach graduate courses in American Studies at Félix Houphoüet Boigny University in Côte D’Ivoire, and work with Côte D’Ivoire’s national museum — the Musée des Civilisations — to develop online and other programming as the museum recovers from having lost roughly eighty percent of its collections during a civil war in the country in 2010-11.
Cohen also has received support from the Smithsonian Institution and George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media. “I am honored and excited to have received this award and to have support from numerous institutions as I begin work on a project that I hope can be a model for international partnership,” Cohen said. “Museums have long borrowed objects from each other, but the next step is working together to expand access to the training and technology that will allow anyone on the planet to learn about a distant place through locals’ own take on their unique cultural heritage.”
Cohen expects to apply his own experiences to classes at St. Mary’s when he returns, as he is already working with Associate Professor of Computer Science Alan Jamieson on a new digital humanities course and says his experience “will no doubt deepen my ability to incorporate Africa into my World History and Atlantic History courses.”