Franklin Announces an Historic Collaboration with Two Lugano Institutions
06/18/2007
The collaboration of Franklin College with two Lugano Institutes for the Study of Anthropology announced June 13, 2007.
June 13, 2007, marked the beginning of an exciting new joint venture among Franklin College Switzerland, the Museo delle Culture of Lugano, and the Istituto di Filosofia Applicata della Facoltà di Teologia of Lugano with the signing of a Collaboration Agreement by the Faculty of Theology, the City of Lugano, and Franklin. This three-party initiative calls for the joint and gradual creation of courses, initially at the undergraduate level, and for the constitution of a summer institute. The current proposed courses would be in specific areas of Anthropology as related to topics such as Religion, Tourism, and Museum Science; a course in Contemporary Philosophy has also been included in the proposal. An initial introductory course in Cultural Anthropology should be available for Franklin students as early as the spring 2008 semester. The theme proposed for the summer institute is “Exoticism and the Voyage in Western Art and Literature,” and it is hoped that its first edition will be launched in summer, 2008. The signing ceremony, which took place at Franklin College and was widely covered by the local press, was followed by a talk by Dr. Cesare Poppi, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Bologna and recent Director of the Sainsbury Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, entitled “Wonders Taken for Signs: Rethinking ‘The Fetish.’”
Franklin College has thus been offered a wonderful opportunity to expand its course offerings and to participate in a topical area of research while extending its academic network locally and abroad. The Museum in particular should constitute both a rich resource for our students and a means of connecting our faculty with a much wider network of similar institutions for the purposes of research and publishing. This proposal had its seeds in the meeting between President Nielsen and Professor Paolo Campione, Director of the Museo delle Culture, during the Murlo Exhibition in Lugano last fall. Franklin was then approached by Professor Campione and by Professor Giovanni Ventimiglia, Director of the Institute of Applied Philosophy, in late spring of this year for discussions leading to the present agreement which is a tribute to the growing reputation of the College in the local academic community. In President Nielsen’s words, “This is an exciting venture for Franklin College, a fruitful collaboration among three institutions of different characters and with different strengths.”
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