We hope that this newsletter reaches you in a safe and healthy place. What a strange semester we have had! We began our series of GVP talks, and we managed to hold our March 6 workshop on Revitalization, Diversity and Gentrification – one of the last public events at Trinity before the COVID-19 Pandemic upended the entire world. Nothing has been the same since then. But we are still looking forward, as we begin to feel the Spring sun on our shoulders.

At the time of writing, we are still hoping to hold a retreat for Institute of International Education-Scholar Rescue Fund (IIE-SRF) scholars and their families on campus in July, even as we are beginning to re-imagine that as a virtual event. Who knows what Fall 2020 at CUGS will look like? We may have numerous virtual events. We know for certain that we will be welcoming Dr. Laura Delgado, who is currently completing her PhD in Urban Planning at MIT, as our next Kelter Post-Doctoral Fellow. We will also welcome a new cohort for the Cities Gateway Program, as we will welcome back around 35 urban studies majors in the classes of 2021 and 2022. We hope to host a rescheduled version of our workshop on climate change and Connecticut’s cities with UConn-Hartford and the University of Hartford (originally scheduled for March 26-27) sponsored by the Hartford Consortium on Higher Education. And other new initiatives are underway.

We successfully submitted a major Undergraduate International Studies and Foreign Language grant with the US Department of Education in March, focused on “Enhancing Global Environmental Studies and Critical Languages at Trinity College.” This was a collaboration of CUGS with urban studies, international studies, language & culture studies and environmental science, and we are thankful to all who helped put it together. We are poised to submit a planning grant in early May to the Social Science Research Council’s Transregional Collaboratory for the Indian Ocean on “China’s Infrastructure-led Globalization in Myanmar and Tanzania.” And we are looking to submit another major grant in the Summer to the Arthur Vining Davis Foundation.

Finally, we invite you to join us in celebrating the contributions from 5 of the outstanding women (Salima Etoka, Na Fu, Julie Gamble, Emily Cummins, and Noor Malik) who have helped to make CUGS such a terrific place to teach, research and work over the years, as Trinity celebrates the 50th anniversary of coeducation on campus.

Garth Myers, Director, Center for Urban and Global Studies

Yipeng Shen, Director, Urban Studies