University and State in the Americas

Williston Chase
Comparative Literature
UC Irvine

Brandon Wild
English
UC Irvine

“University and State in the Americas,” is a multi-disciplinary group of scholars exploring higher educational institutions in Americas from the 18th century to the 21st century. The group aimed to confront the need for comparatist modes of researching the public mandate of the university in light of the question of state form. Emphasizing globally-minded theoretical inquiry, the project interrogated the historical and contemporary role of higher education in the reason of state. This was done in order to refigure research on the university as an exploration of the institutions that academics operate within from the perspective of the very mechanisms that make institutions what they are. In doing so, questions were directed from and about the university and other alternative schooling traditions to problematize existing models of historiography, institutional analysis, and social phenomenology.