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Dear Colleague:

Your institution is a member of Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life. Imagining America (IA) is a national consortium of colleges and universities committed to public scholarship in the arts, humanities, and design. (For what we mean by public scholarship, visit www.imaginingamerica.org.) The consortium was established at the University of Michigan in 2001, and since 2007 has been hosted by Syracuse University. While the President or Chancellor of each member campus appoints two representatives to Imagining America, its activities and benefits are available to all faculty, students, staff, and primary community partners.

Imagining America acts at individual institutional and national consortium levels. For individual member institutions, we serve as a knowledge resource. We consult on planned or existing projects, programs, and curricula. We "match-make" for faculty seeking advice, model programs, or potential partners. Any faculty or student may contact our office with requests for assistance (ImaginingAmerica@syr.edu). You and your community partners are welcome to request our newsletters and publications as well.

Our annual national conference, open to all, with registration discounts for members, offers a unique opportunity for public scholars and artists to come together to encounter new ideas, advance projects, and invigorate practice and thinking. This fall, the conference will be held September 23-25, 2010, in Seattle, Washington, hosted by the University of Washington, Seattle and Bothell campuses. This year's theme, Convergence Zones: Public Cultures and Translocal Practices, signals an exploration of how public scholarship creates new connections among disciplines, communities, and sectors.

Our regional meetings, held in different locations over the course of the academic year, offer geographically proximate universities, colleges, and community partners the opportunity to discuss regional issues and challenges to public scholarship and practice. The meetings also encourage collaboration between member institutions. For more information, contact Dr. Tim Eatman at tkeatman@syr.edu.

IA Collaboratories are drawn from groups of IA campuses and their communities seeking to explore a core area of public scholarship, with a series of conference calls and one face-to-face meeting, paid for with IA seed money. Each team is challenged to produce a proposal for an outside funder, to be identified and pursued with IA's help. Research groups will present their findings at the next IA national conference. In this pilot year, topics include Culture & Community Revitalization, Engagement and Liberal Arts Education, an IA Journal, and K-12 Partnerships with Higher Education. A Call for Proposals will be released in the fall, with a winter deadline for applications.

PAGE (Publicly Active Graduate Education) is our program for graduate students and early-career scholars. PAGE runs an annual Summit, offers fellowships to attend IA's national conference, and provides mentoring, participation in a growing network of publicly engaged students and early-career scholars, and occasional publication opportunities. For more information on the PAGE program, contact director Adam Bush at asbush@gmail.com.

At the national level, Imagining America brings its collective weight to bear on the place and value of public scholarship within the academy. The Tenure Team Initiative on Public Scholarship, a multi-year research project, articulates a broad understanding of the university's public mission and its impact on expanding scholarly and creative practices in the cultural disciplines. Its final report, issued in spring 2008, offers recommendations for the evaluation of public scholarship for tenure and promotion. The project is now in the midst of an action phase featuring regional meetings at member campuses.

Our new research initiative, Assessing the Practices of Public Scholarship (APPS), investigates how to anchor excellent public scholarship in higher education curricula by assessing its impact on student learning, faculty development, and community partners. We consider engaged curricula and projects at beginning and advanced levels and on a continuum of scales (e.g., the assignment, the course, the project, the program) that integrate a significant arts, humanities, or design component. This initiative will offer tools for IA members to measure the impact of their work, to develop more equitable ways to structure campus-community partnerships, and to create and improve syllabi and degree programs.

You may learn more about our work, view examples of the publicly-engaged arts and scholarship at our member campuses, and learn more about participating by visiting our website at www.imaginingamerica.org. Our telephone number is 315-443-8590, or you may contact us at ImaginingAmerica@syr.edu. We look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely yours,

Jan Cohen Cruz
Director, Imagining America