Professor Eric Haralson Inaugural Endowed Professorship in Global Citizenship Funded by Empowerment Charitable Trust
At a recent investiture ceremony, Associate Professor of English Eric Haralson, PhD, officially became the inaugural holder of the Endowed Professorship in Global Citizenship, funded by the Empowerment Charitable Trust.
The Empowerment Charitable Trust is a globally active organization with projects in Asia, Africa, Australia, and at several U.S. universities. It has a special interest in supporting initiatives in social justice, microenterprise, hunger eradication and children’s wellbeing.
Dr. Haralson leads a multi-year project to advance global citizenship, “Global Citizenship and World Literature,” which he founded at Stony Brook in 2015. A multi-disciplinary collaboration with College of Arts and Sciences colleagues, the project helps students confront vital questions about what it means to be a global citizen.
Through the generosity of the Empowerment Charitable Trust, Dr. Haralson developed innovative syllabi using literature, film, and other media. The project established a guest-lecture series, an expansive new anthology of international writings, a website dedicated to global consciousness-raising resources, student-organized global-activism events, and an interdisciplinary faculty/student advisory group.
“Dr. Haralson will contribute greatly to this burgeoning and ever more relevant field of what it means to be a global citizen and how to make our world a more equitable and sustainable place,” said Nicole S. Sampson, interim dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.“Students will be able to think more broadly about their role in the world and how best to serve it.”
In his remarks about the importance of endowed faculty and how it helps Stony Brook recruit the finest minds in their fields, Interim Provost Minghua Zhang, PhD, said, “Thanks to many generous friends, endowed faculty investitures are becoming a perennial tradition at our university. It also allows the institution to provide instruction and mentoring from the best scholars and researchers in the world. It is these teachers who will help prepare our students to meet the challenges of a complex and interconnected global environment, and also leverage Stony Brook’s position as a global university.”
During the ceremony, Dr. Haralson asked the audience to consider opportunities to embrace global citizenship for our common good. “It is such an exhilarating moment for collaborative globalist ventures across the college and beyond,” he said. “May we realize these opportunities to make common cause in pursuit of global consciousness-raising in the classroom and our own lives as humane committed scholar-teachers and administrators.”
Dr. Haralson studied at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Columbia University, specializing in 19th-century American literature. He has published widely on the emergence and cultural resonances of Anglo-American modernism and served on the editorial boards of prominent journals, including Twentieth-Century Literature and American Literary History.
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