Jennifer Gunn: Director (outgoing), Institute for Advanced Study
Bianet Castellanos: Director (incoming), Institute for Advanced Study

Join the Institute for Advanced Study as we celebrate Jennifer Gunn, outgoing director, and welcome Bianet Castellanos, incoming director.

Interdisciplinary networks are at the core of the IAS’s work and mission: as a center, the IAS depends on bringing people together from different cultural, educational, and disciplinary backgrounds, of different ranks and standing from across and outside the University. As director, Jennifer Gunn has forged countless surprising and unexpected connections to help ignite and incubate new projects, programs, and initiatives. How do these ideas come to fruition? And how is interdisciplinary collaboration changing—especially as scholars engage with community partners to address some of today’s most pressing issues? As we look back at how Jennifer Gunn has increased the IAS’s capacity to incubate substantial collaborations, we will also look ahead to the future of what it means to do interdisciplinary work, and how these collaborations—with both internal and external partners—can help us build a just university together.

Following the event, please join us in Northrop’s 4th floor Best Buy Gallery for a reception celebrating the women who are transforming the IAS, interdisciplinary collaboration, and the University.

ABOUT THE PRESENTERS

Bianet Castellanos is an anthropologist and a core faculty member in American Studies. Her new book, Indigenous Dispossession: Housing and Maya Indebtedness in Mexico (Stanford University Press 2020), analyzes how Maya families make sense of the cultural, political, and legal ramifications of neoliberal housing policies that privilege mortgage finance over land redistribution. Her other works include A Return to Servitude: Maya Migration and the Tourist Trade in Cancún (University of Minnesota Press 2010), Comparative Indigeneities of the Américas: Toward a Hemispheric Approach, which she co-edited with Lourdes Gutiérrez Nájera and Arturo Aldama (University of Arizona Press 2012), and the anthology Detours: Travel and the Ethics of Research in the Global South (University of Arizona Press 2019). She edited a forum on settler colonialism in Latin America for America Quarterly and published an article in the special issue on Critical Latinx Indigeneities in the journal Latino Studies. She is the chair of American Studies in the College of Liberal Arts, and the new director of the Institute for Advanced Study.

Jennifer Gunn brings broad experience advancing interdisciplinary research and teaching, both as scholar and administrator. She is History of Medicine Endowed Professor and served for 8 years as director of the Program in the History of Medicine located in the Medical School’s Department of Surgery. She is also faculty in the tri-college Graduate Program in the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine, situated at the intersection of the humanities, social sciences, natural and physical sciences, engineering, and health professions. She is a historian of nineteenth- and twentieth-century medicine, interested in the historical intersections of health, medicine, biology, social sciences, institutions, and public policy. Currently, she is working on a book on the history of rural health and medicine in the Upper Midwest, 1920s-1950s, examining how diverse geographic and economic environments influenced the organization of rural health care delivery and the role of the state in the complex arrangements through which Americans have received health care. In addition, she has done extensive research on the history of population studies and demography in the interwar period, graduate medical education, and the history of philanthropy.

ABOUT IAS THURSDAYS

IAS Thursdays at the Institute for Advanced Study brings a wide range of ideas, conversations, and viewpoints to the heart of the University of Minnesota. Our events are free and open to the public; IAS Thursdays are designed for scholars from all walks of life.