2007 Kaplan Family Distinguished Faculty Fellows
Raymond Craib
Associate Professor, Department of History, Arts & Sciences
“Farmworkers” is a service-learning course offered each spring semester that draws upon the expertise of faculty around campus in order to introduce undergraduate students to the world of migrant labor, with an increasing focus on the lives and labors of migrant farmworkers from Mexico and Guatemala working in upstate New York
The Kaplan Family Distinguished Faculty Fellowship ensures that the course continues, for the long term, and provides funds for students in their service-learning projects. The Fellowship also allows for possibilities of expansion of the pool of lecturers/speakers in the class, institutionalization of the course, and provides resources to network with similar classes in other parts of the country.
Raymond Craib is in the Department of History where he specializes in Modern Latin American history. His first book, Cartographic Mexico: A History of State Fixations and Fugitive Landscapes examined the ways in which property and territory was mapped in 19th and 20th century Mexico. He is currently working on a social history of intellectual life, student politics and the university in Santiago, Chile, from roughly 1900 to 1935. The study focuses in particular on two university students, poets, and political activists and the political, intellectual, and cultural world they inhabited: José Domingo Gómez Rojas and Pablo Neruda.
Ralph Christy
Professor of Emerging Markets, Department of Applied Economics and Management, Agriculture & Life Sciences
The Emerging Markets Field Course, offered by the Emerging Markets Program in the Department of Applied Economics and Management, is offered each spring and is a core element of the department’s training in entrepreneurship, international business and economic development. It involves assigning a team of 4-6 students from Applied Economics and related disciplines, to a company in an emerging economy, where the students will offer small business development services to the firm. The projects involve targeting an issue, problem, or decision that is central to the firm’s strategy, with project types ranging from market entry strategy, product line extension, value chain definition and analysis, product delivery channel definition and analysis, and competitive strategy.
The course offers a unique opportunity for students to engage in service-learning, providing the much needed technical assistance and analytical support to underserved businesses and rural communities, while gaining practical business experiences in emerging markets. In the spring, the team completes a full report, often in the form of a case study that is present to the management of the client firms.
Ralph Christy is Professor of Emerging Markets within the Applied Economics and Management Department at Cornell where he teaches both undergraduate and graduate students, conducts research, and organizes executive education programs on the economic performance of markets in low-income communities. He advises industry leaders and public policy makers on food marketing strategies, economic development, and the organization of the global food economy. Christy is founder and CEO of Market Matters, Inc, a non-profit company with offices in New York and South Africa that works to build the capacity of small-to-medium enterprises in emerging markets. A PhD graduate of Michigan State University, he is former President of the American Agricultural Economics Association, and is currently a Board Member of the Winrock International, the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation, the African Agricultural Capital Fund and the Committee for Economic Development.