April 26, 2007

Wachtel to head new global initiatives program

New associate provost will be Northwestern’s chief international officer

Andrew B. Wachtel, Bertha and Max Dressler Professor in the Humanities, has been named Associate Provost for Global Initiatives, effective June 1. 

The appointment of Wachtel, who will continue to serve as dean of The Graduate School, a post he has held since 2004, was announced by Provost Lawrence B. Dumas.

“As associate provost in the newly created position, Wachtel will be Northwestern’s chief international officer and President Bienen and I will seek his advice as international initiatives are proposed by him and various units of the University,” Dumas said.

A student-faculty-administration Advisory Committee on Global Initiatives will be established shortly and will help guide work in this area. The International Office, the Study Abroad Office and the Office of International Program Development will report to the Provost through Wachtel, as will the Program of African Studies and the Roberta Buffett Center for Comparative and International Studies (BCICS), which Wachtel has led since 2003. He will step down from the leadership of BCICS.

The appointment of Wachtel follows a national search for a director of a proposed Office of Global Programs. A nine-person screening committee, chaired by Dean Barbara J. O’Keefe, interviewed a number of prospects for this position.

Dumas said, “I met with the committee following those interviews and discussed the matter with President Bienen. I concluded that we would be best served by redefining the position and placing the coordination of global affairs in the hands of a distinguished senior faculty member serving as associate provost rather than a career administrator serving as director.”

A faculty member at Northwestern since 1991, Wachtel served from 1997 to 2004 as chair of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and participated centrally in the development of that department into one of the very strongest in the nation. He has been an elected member of the General Faculty Committee (1998-2001), including one year as chair. During 2006 he served as chair of a Task Force on Global Engagement, whose report provided “a plan for how to broaden and deepen Northwestern’s global engagement, with recommendations for how to proceed in terms of conceptual leadership, investment of financial and human capital, and operational implementation.”

The Buffett Center for Comparative and International Studies (BCICS) has flourished under his energetic and imaginative leadership.  Since he became Director of BCICS in 2003, the Center has grown from a unit with some 25 active faculty associates and an annual budget of $400,000 per year to a unit with nearly 200 faculty affiliates and an annual budget approaching $2 million. During that same period sponsored research grew ten-fold, while administrative expenses absorbed a dramatically smaller portion of the center’s budget. 

As director of BCICS, Wachtel worked successfully to engage faculty participation and to identify opportunities to create synergies between faculty, graduate student and undergraduate interests, Dumas said. BCICS instituted a weekly faculty and fellows colloquium in which faculty from throughout the University meet to share their work. At the same time, BCICS provided seed funding for faculty and graduate student reading and research groups. 

Each year, BCICS hosts approximately 15 visitors for periods ranging from a quarter to an academic year; the visitors are provided office space and an attractive intellectual environment. BCICS also regularly partners with a variety of other university and school-based programs, including the French Interdisciplinary Group, Latin American and Caribbean Studies, the Center for Global Culture and Communication, Globalizing American Studies, and Cells to Society. A graduate research colloquium brings together a multidisciplinary group of students, most of whom have received BCICS summer seed funding for research projects abroad.

Wachtel is the author or editor of 10 books and more than 50 articles on Russian and South Slavic literature, culture, history and society. His most recent published books are “Plays of Expectations: Intertextual Relations in Russian 20th-Century Drama” and “Remaining Relevant After Communism: The Role of the Writer in Eastern Europe,” both of which appeared in 2006. The latter has already come out in Serbian and Bulgarian as well. 

His earlier books include “Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation: Literature and Cultural Politics in Yugoslavia,” “The Battle for Childhood: Creation of a Russian Myth,” “An Obsession with History: Russian Writers Confront the Past,” and “Petrushka: Sources and Contexts.” Forthcoming books include “A Concise History of the Balkans” and “A Cultural History of Russian Literature.”

In recognition of his academic work in the area of literary criticism he was elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003. For his work in areas relating to U.S. foreign policy, he was elected to the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations in 2001.