A Message from the Director

Welcome to the Center for Ethnic Studies and the Arts.  Studying the distinctive, yet synthetic relationships among minority communities and the arts, CESA supports both those who specialize in individual ethnic studies areas and those who wish to learn more about how cultural diversity defines and enriches the arts. Our public programs, faculty and student research activities, educational opportunities, and other innovations have inspired dialogues and new creative force about ethnic identities and the arts, writ broadly. In our first two years, we have sponsored lectures, book discussion groups, a graduate proseminar, a junior faculty publications workshop, a symposium featuring a regional Hawkeye Chef cookoff, and the publication of a student-written cookbook

As CESA’s inaugural director, I thought I’d have to define and defend the term “ethnic studies” as interdisciplinary approaches to American cultural communities through markers of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and class. Ethnic studies, however, turns out to be common parlance in most collegiate settings and, instead, “the arts” is the more ambiguous term in the Center’s title and mission that I regularly have to explain.  At CESA, we embrace not only the traditional fine arts, but all aspects of expressive culture, including vernacular traditions, rituals, and commercial popular culture.

With this definition in mind, we begin in 2008  our three-year Arts in Everyday Life initiative, with focus on three research clusters: Women of Color in Popular Culture; Critical Food Studies; Identities and Technoculture.

Lauren Rabinovitz
Professor of American Studies and Cinema
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Collegiate Fellow