After three years of campaigning, the Center for Women’s Global Leadership (CWGL), founded at Rutgers University in 1989, is pleased to announce that the United Nations General Assembly took action today, September 14, 2009, to adopt a resolution that will enable the creation of the new United Nations gender entity.

CWGL, a unit of the Institute for Women’s Leadership (IWL) at Rutgers University, is a principal coordinator of a civil society led initiative entitled the Gender Equality Architecture Reform Campaign (GEAR).  Women’s rights organizations and allies from around the world have been advocating for three years for a stronger better resourced agency on gender equality and women’s empowerment rather than the current fragmented state of work on women’s rights.

Assistant Professor of Physics & Astronomy Andrew Baker is spending the Fall 2009 semester in Chile as a visiting scientist with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) project.  ALMA is an international astronomy facility under construction by a European, North American, and East Asian collaboration in cooperation with the Republic of Chile.  When complete, it will feature 66 radio telescopes operating in concert on the Chajnantor plateau some 16,500 feet above sea level.  Baker is working with the members of a talented international science team to help commission the array, a role he characterizes as "a great challenge and an enormous honor."  The first scientific observations with ALMA will be made in late 2011; Baker plans to use the array to study the formation and evolution of distant galaxies, a major theme of the research he conducts with undergraduate and graduate students at Rutgers.

Full information about ALMA is available at http://www.almaobservatory.org/.

The Confucius Institute at Rutgers University happily announces three new initiatives to promote Chinese language and culture during the 2009-2010 academic year. The first is a Faculty Fellowship in in Chinese Studies. This fellowship is available to all faculty members, full-time and part-time, affiliated with a university or college in the state of New Jersey and are engaged in teaching and/or research on China. Up to 5 Faculty Fellowships each at $3,000 will be offered for the 2009-2010 year. The second initiative is a scholarship for students enrolled in a Chinese Language Teacher Training program. All students enrolled in a Chinese language teacher training program at a university or college in New Jersey are eligible for one of 6 possible scholarships each at $1,000 for the 2009-2010 year. The final initiative is an essay Contest for college students studying Chinese. Any student enrolled in a Chinese language program at a university or college in New Jersey can participate. 3 prizes will be awarded. For more details, visit http://www.ciru.rutgers.edu/

Rutgers University’s Department of African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian Languages and Literatures and The Center for African Studies present a 2009/2010 Competition: SELF-DIRECTED AFRICAN LANGUAGE STUDY AT RUTGERS – NEW BRUNSWICK

Applications Must Be Submitted Two Weeks Before the Fall Semester Begins:  August 14, 2009.

Description
The Department of African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian Languages and Literatures and the Center for African Studies are sponsoring the study of any one African language (other than Arabic, Swahili, Yoruba, and Twi -- which are already offered by the AMESALL Department) through the self-directed language study track (or tutorial track) in the 2009/2010 Academic Year.  Only ONE AWARD is available and selection will be competitive and based on the merits of the application.  The successful student will be expected to work on a one-to-one basis with an assigned tutor of the relevant language.  Performance and proficiency in the language will be evaluated by an appointed external examiner.

Eligibility
The interested applicant must:  (a) be enrolled full-time in the graduate school or any professional school of Rutgers University; (b) be highly motivated, self-disciplined and self-directed.

To find out more about the competition and to apply please click here.

Dean of International Programs Announces 2009-2011 Global Initiatives Theme

Dear Colleagues:

The unprecedented crises that have engulfed the world are fundamentally changing the ways in which we think, work, and live our everyday lives, as well as the ways in which we interact with our social, political, and physical environment.  Things that we have taken for granted are no longer available; and events that we did not anticipate seem to be here to stay.  It looks as though our futures are indisputably to be altered.

The 2009-2011 Global Initiative theme Ecologies in the balance? will explore these new realities and attempt to grapple with the consequences of these massive changes.  This year the theme will for the first time take on a biennial format.  During 2009-2010 we will examine the theme of ecologies through the lenses of current crises and their wide-ranging impacts.  In 2010-2011 we will emphasize the search for the solutions to the crises that threaten to undermine the precarious environmental, social, political, economic, and psychological balances that we strive to maintain in our worlds.

Realizing the extant interest in international development policy and planning of an outstanding number of graduate students and faculty members in the Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy, a dedicated interest group in this area has been established. The “International Development Interest Group”, or IDIG, functions as a forum for the exchange of ideas and information as well as a platform for collaboration around various themes and geographies of relevance in planning and policy work in low- and middle-income countries.

We are currently holding regular meetings every two weeks to discuss the different aspects of our activities, including the exploration of networks and project collaboration with existing centers, departments and organizations at Rutgers already active in international development work.  Our current interests include (but are not exclusive to) the following sectors or themes within policymaking and planning: transportation, healthcare, housing, energy and petroleum, environmental vulnerabilities, water management, fiscal policy, micro-finance and financial mobilization, public sector accounting, adaptive capacity of vulnerable urban communities, labor management, women’s entrepreneurial activities, political economy of development, international trade, tourism, telecommunications, war and post-conflict planning, security and defense, methodologies of research and field work.  At present, we are working to build a collaboration project based on the UN’s Millennium Development Goals with an Engineers without Borders chapter engaged in work with vulnerable communities in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and are continuously searching to engage in other such initiatives.

Aiming to build up and strengthen a network of similarly dedicated individuals and groups active in the international policy and planning field, we cordially invite you to attend our bi-weekly general meetings. To receive the announcements for meetings and special events as well as participating in discussions and access the related resources posted by members, you can join our Sakai website which is publicly accessible and listed as “IDIG”. For more information, please contact Bahareh Sehatzadeh at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Click here to view the complete letter  from Dean Regulska.

The year 2008 marks the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).  (http://www.unhchr.ch/udhr/lang/eng.htm) In commemoration, several UN events, such as the UDHR60 campaign, as well as many local, national, and transnational initiatives, will be taking place around the world throughout the year.  During the 2008-2009 academic year, the Rutgers community will join these debates and discussions through a series of coordinated events focused on Human Rights with the tentative title Human Rights: Content and Discontent. The activities organized under this theme will bring to campus scholars, politicians, policy-makers, activists, and artists. RU faculty and students will engage with our visitors through panel discussions, conferences, workshops, and seminars.

The Rutgers Institute for Research on Women (IRW) is pleased to welcome two Global Scholars, Eniko Magyari-Vincze and Salma Maoulidi, this Spring 2009 term with support from the Rutgers Academic Excellence Fund.