Cynthia Miller-Idriss

Cynthia Miller-Idriss

New York University, Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development

Assistant Professor of International Education and Educational Sociology

Phone: 212-992-9374
Email: cmi1@nyu.edu

• Humanities and Social Sciences
• International Education
• Sociology of Education (including Education Policy)

For the past decade, my research focus has been on nationalism and education in international and comparative contexts, and my three current research projects all examine these issues within higher education settings globally. The first and most ambitious project, which I am conducting together with colleagues at the Social Science Research Council, is an examination of internationalization and interdisciplinarity in higher education in the U.S., Germany, and the U.K. Among other issues, I am interested in comparing the extent to which various nation-states promote the production of knowledge about international and regional issues in ways that safeguard their own national interests.

With nearly $1M in funding from the U.S. Department of Education, we collected data for the U.S. portion of the research from 2005-2008 with a focus on four overlapping regions of the world: the Middle East, South Asia, Eurasia/Russia, and Central Asia. The project had a sequential mixed-methods research design consisting of 17 qualitative site visits to 12 U.S. campuses, during which we conducted hundreds of interviews with university administrators and faculty as well as focus groups with students and faculty and many hundred hours of observation; statistical analysis of the U.S. Department of Education’s national (EELIAS) database on area studies centers; national surveys of students and area studies centers; and document analysis of hundreds of area studies center proposals, reports, and other university documentation. The German and U.K. comparisons will be launched in 2009. I am currently working on two book manuscripts from this project: an edited volume (together with Seteney Shami) on Middle East Studies, and a book on the internationalization and the American university, together with Mitchell Stevens and Seteney Shami.

The second research project, which I am conducting together with Professor Ann Morning in NYU’s Sociology Department, studies college students’ conceptions of race and nation, and focuses in particular on immigrant students from what is called the “1.5” generation, who immigrated to the U.S. before the age of 12. We received pilot study and preparatory research funding from the Spencer Foundation and from New York University. We are now awaiting approval from the IRB at both NYU and at the institution we plan to study—a “commuter” university which serves a high proportion of first-generation college students from immigrant backgrounds, and will launch data collection, including interviews and qualitative observation, in the fall of 2009.

The final research project is a study of the rapidly expanding phenomenon of branch and satellite campuses of foreign universities being set up in overseas locations. My recent paper, “Exporting Higher Education: Replica Offshore Campuses in the Middle East,” which I co-authored with Elizabeth Hanauer, was commissioned by the Social Science Research Council as part of the Ford Foundation of Cairo project on University Governance and Autonomy in the Changing Landscape of Higher Education in the Arab World. In short, my current research projects all focus on higher education settings, examining both structural transformations in the university setting across a range of international settings as well as conceptions of race and nation, a focus which extends my earlier work.

My first book, Blood and Culture: Race, Youth, and Belonging in a Re-Imagined Germany, is in production at Duke University Press and will be published in August 2009. This project emerged from an enduring interest in the relationship between national policy and citizenship education, which I have explored in smaller research projects and residences in Poland, Germany, and Burundi. Based on over eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in three vocational schools in Berlin between 1999 and 2004, Blood and Culture uses an ethnographic study of working-class youth and their vocational school teachers in Berlin as a lens for examining how patterns of national identity are constructed and transformed across generations. It argues that generational gaps in national understanding contribute to the appeal of political, religious, or ideological extremist groups and movements for young people, using the German case to show how teachers’ well-intentioned efforts to promote an anti-nationalist identity inadvertently increase the appeal of neo-Nazism among their working-class students.