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Don't look for the University's Institute of African American Research to keep
a low profile under new director William A."Sandy" Darity Jr.
"My big dream is that people will view this institute as a center of scholarly
activity in all the research areas that encompass African-American studies,"
said Darity, also Carolina's Cary C. Boshamer Professor of Economics and
Sociology.
Carolina Provost Robert Shelton named Darity July 1 to direct the institute,
founded in 1995 to help lead scholarly investigation into all aspects of black
life, as well as public and private policies and programs affecting their
lives.
"Sandy Darity's record of personal scholarship is stellar and will serve as an
example for research activities in the institute," Shelton said. "His high
academic profile will empower his directorship and attract participation by top
scholars from across the campus and nation."
Darity aims to gather ideas from faculty and graduate students in a variety of
disciplines to set the center's intellectual direction. His own ideas for
topics needing research include remedies for racial and economic inequality,
controversies surrounding various reparations proposals and racial achievement
gaps in public schools.
Another topic begging for more investigation, he said, is the trans-Atlantic
slave trade, which contributed to what scholars call the African diaspora
("di-AS-pora"), the spread and influence of Africans to most other areas of the
world, where they now live far removed from their ancestral homelands.
Because much of this history and influence wasn't documented or analyzed at the
time, researchers today try to fill gaps in this body of knowledge, as well as
examine the current status of blacks, said Archie Ervin, assistant to the
chancellor and director for minority affairs.
"It's important for this institute, which is purely an academic enterprise, to
develop research questions that relate to the diaspora," Ervin said. "It is a
scholarly enterprise designed to generate cutting-edge research and to present
it in useable ways, in both the academy and the society at large."
The institute, now with offices in the Porthole Building, eventually will be
housed in the privately funded, $9 million new building for the Sonja Haynes
Stone Black Cultural Center, expected to be finished in spring 2003.
Besides identifying important questions, recruiting scholars to probe them and
seeking grants to fund research, the center will continue three activities,
Darity said: sponsoring an annual student research conference; helping present
a symposium on a jazz artist or topic during the Carolina Jazz Festival each
February; and bringing African-American studies scholars from other countries
to speak at Carolina. The institute may also consider annual themes on a
particular topic, scholar, artist or novelist, Darity said. "This work is
interdisciplinary," he said. "It spans the humanities, social sciences, fine
arts and some dimensions of public health, medicine and the natural
sciences."
At Carolina since 1983, Darity teaches courses including honors macroeconomics
and financial markets. He also is a research professor of public policy,
African and African-American studies and economics at Duke University; he
directs the Minority Undergraduate Research Assistant Program.
Darity has directed the economics department's undergraduate honors and
graduate studies programs. He has been a visiting professor or fellow at
institutions including the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, the
London School of Economics and Political Science, the National Humanities
Center, the University of Tulsa and the Centro de Excelencia Empresarial
(Monterey, Mexico).
Other teaching posts have been at the universities of Texas (Austin) and
Maryland (College Park) and Simmons College (Boston). In 1980, he was staff
economist for the National Urban League's research department. In 1997, he was
president of the Southern Economic Association; from 1993-96, a member of the
American Economic Association's executive committee.
Darity has co-written four books, including Macroeconomics with James
Kenneth Galbraith (1994), edited five more and penned a long list of articles,
published in the American Economic Review, the Journal of Economic
Perspectives and similar scholarly publications.
He was raised mostly in Amherst, Mass., where his father, William A. Darity
Sr., a former UNC trustee, still lives. He earned a bachelor's degree magna cum
laude in economics and political science from Brown University in 1974, studied
at the London School of Economics and Political Science from 1974-75 and
completed a doctorate in economics in 1978 at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology.
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