The Center for the Americas

Research

Collaborative Research Across Academic Disciplines

The Center for the Americas embodies Vanderbilt University's commitment to innovation in research and higher education. At the Center, we are dedicated to changing the ways in which researchers engage issues of social, economic, and political significance to the Americas. We believe that truly groundbreaking advances are most likely to result from personal interaction and intense, focused collaborations that cross disciplinary and professional boundaries. This belief forms the basis of the Center's three-stage method for encouraging faculty and students to join together as they test, grow, and apply new ideas: Incubators, Work Groups, and Project Groups.

Incubators allow the faculty members and students to present a new research topic to informal groups of colleagues and others from outside the University. Over the course of a semester of regular gatherings, incubator participants discuss the convener's topic, testing its conceptual viability and the group's desire to collaborate. If an incubator generates sustained interest from its members, they are invited to articulate a more formal research agenda and become a more permanent part of the Center's work. The Center supports any number of incubators at a given moment in time.

Work Groups grow out of successful incubators. Starting from the broader topic identified in the incubator, work group members research the topic from various disciplinary viewpoints. At regular group meetings, members present findings to the group, question each other, and continually focus their inquiry. At the end of two semesters, work groups gather their collective conclusions into a publishable final report. Ideally, a work group's efforts result in a concept paper that the Center and the work group's leaders present to interested donors in an effort to secure long-term support for testing and implementing a corrective strategy to the problem that the group investigated. At any given time, four to six work groups may work within the Center, each having at its disposal a substantial annual budget for group activities.

Project Groups generally result from work group concepts that outside donors decide to support. Project groups conduct long-term research and apply those findings to help solve concrete problems in the Americas. Although projects may operate for 3-5 years with outside support, they endeavor in their final phases to build partnerships with other organizations to ensure that the changes they foster stand the test of time.

Anguilla

Antigua And Barbuda

Argentina

Aruba

The Bahamas

Barbados

Belize

Bermuda

Bolivia

Brazil

British Virgin Islands

Canada

Cayman Islands

Chile

Colombia

Costa Rica

Cuba

Dominica

Dominican Republic

Ecuador

El Salvador

Falkland Islands

France

Greenland

Grenada

Guadeloupe

Guatemala

Guyana

Haiti

Honduras

Jamaica

Martinique

Mexico

Montserrat

Netherlands Antilles

Nicaragua

Panama

Paraguay

Peru

Puerto Rico

Saint Kitts and Nevis

St. Lucia

St. Pierre and Miquelon

St. Vincent & Grenadines

Suriname

Trinidad and Tobago

Turks and Caicos Islands

Uruguay

United States

U.S. Virgin islands

Venezuela