The Saint Rose Chronicle

Issue date: 9/24/08 Section: News

Media Credit: Alex Tunney Speaker Eric Paul meets with an attendee after presenting a lecture

Now on its third year, the Center for Citizenship, Race, and Ethnicity Studies (CREST) has tried to make contemporary and historical issues accessible to faculty and students at the College of Saint Rose. CREST has held colloquiums and lectures from visiting professors, professors from campus and Ph.D. candidates from around the nation, including the upcoming Third Annual Kermit Hall Memorial Constitutional Day Lecture.

Since the center was officially chartered in February of 2006, its director has been Professor John Williams-Searle. Williams-Searle was an adjunct professor in the spring 2003 semester, and became a Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science the following year. Williams-Searle left to teach at the University of Mississippi. He returned to Albany after teaching in Mississippi for a year, and interviewed for the position of director for the center.

Through the initial efforts of political science and history professors on campus, CREST sought to cultivate research on campus and to further improve the academic reputation of the college. Currently the executive committee is made up of four professors from the History and Political Science department with one professor from the English department. Despite its roots, Williams-Searle stressed the interdisciplinary nature of the center.

"It is truly interdisciplinary," said Williams-Searle. "We want people from all parts of campus."

Williams-Searle hopes that an upcoming election for a new executive committee will create a committee that will better represent all the schools of study on campus.

Currently the center sponsors three Residential Fellows and two Diversity Dissertation Fellows. Residential Fellows are professors from the campus who are sponsored by CREST for research.

"[Being a Residential Fellow] allows faculty members more time to research and publish," said Williams-Searle. "If you're teaching as much as professors do at Saint Rose, sometimes you don't have time to pursue research."

One of the current Residential Fellows is Professor Kenneth Krauss of the English department. On Thursday, Sept. 9, Krauss presented his research topic, 'The Value of Nothing: The Signification of the Unstated in Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie.' Krauss discussed the basic principles of his work, which centered on the use of language in conjunction with the implied homosexuality of the character Tom in the aforementioned play. Since the play was written in the 1940s, homosexuality was rarely discussed and when it was, the language used to discuss it was quite different than contemporary language.

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