MISSION VIEJO : College Gets Grant for Cultural Studies

Thanks to a $190,000 national grant, Saddleback College will hold two summer institutes aimed at introducing a wide range of faculty members to Asian and Latin American literature and culture.

The grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities will help broaden the cultural perspectives and curriculum at Saddleback, which, like other colleges across the state, is enrolling increasing numbers of Latino and Asian students, said Daniel Rivas, a professor of French and the community college’s dean of liberal arts.

“The idea is to give our faculty members training and the opportunity to read and discuss and acquire a background in these literatures and cultures so that they can integrate them into the courses they teach,” Rivas said.

“There is a wealth of ideas in these literatures that have hardly been explored because our educational system has been so limited usually to the Western tradition,” Rivas added. “We feel there are many important currents of thought in both Asian literature and Latin American literature that our students should be exposed to. . . . We don’t want to do away with the Western tradition, but we feel we need to include other perspectives, too.”

Rivas said the grant also will make it possible to bring guest lecturers and seminar leaders to the Mission Viejo campus, where instructors from disciplines including the humanities, sociology, economics, theater arts and nursing will attend a variety of seminars this summer and next year. It also means the college can provide stipends to the 25 or so faculty expected to attend each session.

The first faculty-study seminar will focus on Chinese and Japanese literature and culture for four weeks beginning June 10.

Seminar leaders will be Theodore Huters, a professor in UC Irvine’s department of East Asian languages and literatures, and Esperanza Ramirez-Christensen, a professor at the University of Michigan’s department of Asian languages and cultures. Guest lecturers will include UCLA professor Leo Lee and Anthony Yu of the University of Chicago.

Latin American literature and culture will be the topic for the second summer institute, which will be held in 1992 from June 8 through July 3.

Each week of the Latin American institute will be led by a different scholar.

The first will be Saul Sosnowski, chairman of the University of Maryland’s department of Spanish and Portuguese, who has done considerable research on Latin American writers Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortazar, among others.

Sosnowski will be followed by Jorge Ruffinelli, professor of Spanish and Spanish-American literature at Stanford University, who studies the Latin American novel and short story forms. Third will be Francine Masiello, a professor of Spanish and comparative literature at UC Berkeley, who studies women in culture and politics in Latin America. The fourth and final seminar leader will be Regina Harrison, a professor of Spanish at Bates College in Maine. Her specialty is the literature of the Andean region of South America.