Kuruvilla wins award
Sarosh Kuruvilla, ILR professor and chair of ILR International Programs, has been awarded a grant from Cornell’s Jeffrey S. Lehman Fund for Scholarly Exchange with China. The grant amounts to $19,000 and will support collaboration between the ILR School and Tsinghua University's Center for Contemporary China Studies.
This plan was discussed last September at the international conference Breaking down Chinese Walls: The Changing Faces of Labor & Employment in China, which was held at ILR School. The conference gathered more than 80 professors, students and labor activists from around the world to debate the state of labor in China. Professor Kuruvilla said that the grant will "primarily used to finance faculty and graduate student travel" to Tsingua.
The long-term goal is to establish the Cornell-Tsinghua Labor Studies Program at the Center for Contemporary China Studies at Tsinghua University. The program will facilitate faculty and graduate student research, but will also serve to help train a new generation of labor scholars in China.
A first step in that direction will be the establishment of a Cornell-Tsinghua Public Lecture Series. In the Fall, Dean Katz and Professor Kuruvilla will travel to Tsinghua as the first speakers in the Cornell-Tsinghua labor lecture series, and use their time there to work out details regarding how our two schools could work together.
In addition, an ILR doctoral student will spend 3 months in the Fall in Tsinghua doing field research. In the Spring, faculty and graduate students from Tsinghua will visit the ILR school to present their labor studies research.
The Jeffrey Sean Lehman Fund for Scholarly Exchange with China was established in 2006 in honor of Cornell's 11th president. A faculty and graduate student exchange program, the Lehman fund supports several projects each year involving substantive interaction between Cornell and the finest higher education institutions in China. The fund is administered by the Office of the Vice Provost for International Relations.