British Council and SSRC award grant to Ali Vural Ak Center

British Council and SSRC award grant to Ali Vural Ak Center

The Ali Vural Ak Center for Global Islamic Studies has been awarded a grant by the British Council and the Social Science Research Council to develop frameworks and resources for teaching the history of cultures and societies in the Mediterranean region.

Dr. Peter Mandaville, Director of the Ali Vural Ak Center, is the Principal Investigator for the project, titled “Our Shared Past in the Mediterranean”, and will spearhead its implementation with the help of the center’s Senior Research Associate, Susan Douglass, who is currently completing her Ph.D. in World History at Mason.

This grant was awarded as part of Our Shared Past, a collaborative grants program offered by the British Council and SSRC, to support innovative approaches to the study of world history. The Our Shared Past program aims to reinforce the importance of world history in the curriculum, and to reorient students’ thinking to place more emphasis on the constant interactions diverse cultures had with one another throughout history and how these experiences shaped the world today.

In this spirit, “Our Shared Past in the Mediterranean” will develop a strategy and a set of curriculum materials for secondary and undergraduate education focused on the region’s central role in cultural and commercial exchange throughout the millennia. The project also will produce new teaching modules to be utilized and distributed to educators in the United States, Europe and the Mediterranean region itself. Educators of all levels will have access to these new tools through online and professional development channels almost immediately following the completion of the project, helping to affect a substantial change in the way Mediterranean history is taught.

In connection with the project, the Ali Vural Ak Center will also host a scholars’ workshop at Mason in Spring 2013, bringing together key historians of the Mediterranean with prominent curriculum specialists to develop these curriculum materials during the 2012-2013 grant period.