News and Information
Emory University
Atlanta, GA 30322
Release date: March 24, 1997
Contact: Nancy Seideman, Associate Director
Violence---at least in the academic sense---will enter Emory University classrooms this fall when the faculty establishes a minor in violence studies to address one of the most significant problems confronting the United States and many regions of the world today.
"Whether expressed in private fears, or through the extreme crime of genocide, interpersonal violence dominates our modern world," says Emory history associate professor Michael Bellesiles, who oversees the new program. "Despite the large number of Emory faculty who research and teach on the subject, there is no sequential course of study to help students understand the problem of violence in its wider context---its history, representation, and theories of origins and responses."
Emory faculty currently teach a wide range of violence-related courses, from juvenile delinquency in sociology and injury prevention and control in public health, to the rhetoric and representation of violence in the English department. The minor will not require the addition of new courses, with the exception of a required year-long introductory course.
The interdisciplinary minor will introduce undergraduate students to major literature and theories on violence from the humanities, social and behavioral sciences, public health, and medical research. Students also will participate in an internship and organize an annual conference on the study of violence for the Emory and Atlanta communities.
An important goal of the violence studies program is to move students from their studies to direct action in the community, says Art Kellermann, MD, director of the Center for Injury Control at Emory's Rollins School of Public Health and acting chief of the university's emergency medicine division. "You can't understand and work toward preventing violence unless you are grounded in real life experiences," says Kellermann, who is actively involved in developing and implementing the minor. "So often people complain that what they learned in the classroom is never used in real life. The violence minor gives us an opportunity to demonstrate the connection between the classroom and the real world."
Although a few other colleges have created institutes and programs on violence-related issues, to Bellesiles' knowledge Emory has developed the first such program to focus on undergraduate studies.
Bellesiles says he anticipates that the program will offer a prototype for building bridges between education and communities on a range of social programs and challenges, beginning in Emory's hometown of Atlanta. The city offers a host of resources for the program, including government agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, and nonprofit organizations that combat violence including Mothers of Murdered Sons (MOMS) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
According to Bellesiles, he already has been "inundated" with requests for student interns from Atlanta area groups. He says that students will work with both perpetrators and victims of violence in such settings as the Legal Aid Center, the DeKalb County Jail, Fulton County District Attorney's Office and the Rape Crisis Center. The program also will explore internship opportunities abroad through The Carter Center's conflict resolution program.