The International Teaching Fellowship, a joint venture between Brown and the Instituto de Empresa, will provide those who have received a doctoral degree from Brown with an opportunity to teach in Spain starting next September. Organizers of the teaching fellowship at IE, an institution known for its graduate programs and especially its business school, said they hope the influx of Brown PhD recipients will boost the credentials of their fledgling undergraduate program.
The teaching fellowship requires that the fellows teach 130 hours in either undergraduate or graduate humanities classes at IE's campus in either Madrid or Segovia. In addition to teaching in Spain, the fellows will have the option of working at Brown's Cogut Center for the Humanities for one month. The fellowship lasts eleven months total but could be renewable.
IE's business school is ranked eighth in Europe, according to the Economist. Its undergraduate school opened in 2009 and has yet to attain the same prestige. Both the undergraduate and graduate programs stress liberal arts, but since the humanities department is young and has few faculty members, Brown fellows will allow IE to expand in scope and content, wrote Rolf Strom-Olsen, director of humanities at IE, in an email to The Herald.
Michael Steinberg, director of the Cogut Center, said he is excited about the program. IE has always been "very adventurous and forward-thinking," he said. Steinberg said he thought the teaching fellowship will benefit the fellows as much as the fellows will help IE.
"We don't have a business school — they're known for their business school," he said. "We are known for humanities — they're just building their humanities program."
Fellows will design a curriculum for one or two classes in their field. Strom-Olsen wrote that IE intends to give the fellows "considerable latitude in designing a class that reflects her or his scholarly interest."
The collaboration comes on the heels of another partnership between the two universities — the IE Brown Executive MBA program, whose inaugural class began courses earlier this year. The joint MBA program holds classes in Spain and Providence, but students do most of the coursework online, allowing them to work while earning the degree. The program combines IE's business school with Brown's humanities departments to create a degree that incorporates a liberal arts component into the traditional MBA program.
