This track served not only to continue the discussion of the importance of internationalizing the curriculum, but also as an impetus for laying out a framework to do so. The papers and subsequent discussions in this track highlighted both the challenges and the opportunities for internationalization in the classroom and the discipline.

As a tenured, full professor in an endowed peace studies chair at my home institution, I chose to spend my 2009–10 sabbatical year as an American Political Science Association Congressional Fellow. Why? As I saw it, my colleagues who teach chemistry need to work with electron spectrometers; my colleagues who teach ethnomusicology need to perform with Javanese gamelans. In an analogous way, I believed that my own work with Congress would energize and refocus my research and teaching. All subfields of intellectual inquiry have their blind spots, and within the subfield of peace studies the largest blind spot may be the perspective that I thought might be gained from being a foreign policy insider. Again and again, my courses began and ended with students asking me to explain how or why the United States behaved and behaves in ways that baffle the rest of the world. I found myself saying something about “political will” and believed that if I were to answer that question in a way that felt remotely satisfying, I needed to spend some time on the ground observing how the “sausage” was made.

Walter Owen Filley, Jr., passed away on March 23, 2010, at age 89 in Manchester Center, Vermont, where he had lived for seven years in an assisted living facility. Born in New Haven, Connecticut, on September 22, 1920, he attended New Haven High School and graduated from the the Choate School in 1937. He then spent a year as an exchange student sponsored by Choate in a South German school. He received his BA from Yale in 1942 before joining the Army for three years, serving mostly as a sergeant in the Counterintelligence Corps with the 2nd Armored Division in Western Europe from 1944 to 1945.

Track participants engaged in rich discussions about “internationalization” in college and university curricula. We began by considering contending definitions of central concepts and educational objectives associated with internationalization. Participants discussed different possible avenues of internationalization, including the development of new classes, an infusion of subjects linked to global affairs in existing classes across the curriculum, cultural programming, and the creation of new interdisciplinary classes. We also addressed study abroad programs, language and cross-cultural training, and partnerships and exchanges.

The political science program of the National Science Foundation (NSF) announces it awards for basic research support and dissertation improvement grants for fiscal year 2010. The program funded 75 new projects and 31 doctoral dissertation improvement proposals. Additional program funds were spent on continuing grant increments, which result from awards that were made in previous fiscal years, but for which funds are being disbursed on a yearly basis instead of upfront. The political science program spent $12,753,794 on these research, training, and workshop projects and $345,389 on dissertation training grants for political science students. The program holds two grant competitions annually—Regular Research, August and January 15; and Dissertation Improvement, January 15—and constitutes a major source of political science research funding as part of fulfilling NSF's mission to encourage theoretically focused empirical investigations aimed at improving the explanation of fundamental social and political processes and structures.

Dennis W. Hostetler of Collinsville, professor emeritus of public administration and policy analysis, died December 31, 2010, after a long illness. He was 68.

The annual APSA Africa Workshop, Representation Reconsidered: Ethnic Politics and Africa's Governance Institutions in Comparative Perspective was held in partnership with the Institute for Development Studies at University of Nairobi in Kenya, from July 23 to August 6. It was the fourth residential workshop of a multi-year initiative that APSA will convene in sub-Saharan Africa from 2008 though 2014 (previous workshops were held in Senegal, Ghana, and Tanzania).

It is with a heavy heart that the American Australian Association and APSA Congressional Fellowship announce the passing on Saturday, February 19, 2011, of American Australian Association/APSA Congressional Fellow Sarah Jane Merl Miskin of Canberra, Australia. Her immediate survivors include her husband Ben Miskin. Having battled with cancer which delayed her participation in the class of 2008–09, the cancer went into remission and she joined her 2009–10 class of Congressional Fellows for the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies Foreign Affairs Seminar in October 2009. The remission, however, was regrettably short-lived, and she had to return to Australia in January 2010. Throughout this tragic roller-coaster of health, and in the regrettably brief four months of her association with the fellowship, Sarah Miskin displayed a tenacity of spirit, an indomitable optimism, an infectious love of friendship, and a thorough commitment to the fellowship—her legacy includes a standard of excellence as a Fellow which will be hard to match by the generations of Fellows who will follow in her wake. She was the epitome of what can hope for in the international participation in the fellowship.

Assessment, particularly program assessment, has reached a new height in the APSA with the publication of an edited volume, Assessment in Political Science (2008), followed by the appointment in 2010 of an association-wide working group on assessment. This task force has been asked to investigate current practices in program assessment and make recommendations regarding the role that the APSA should play to help departments and faculty conduct assessment better. Track participants were encouraged to think about how the issues they raised could help guide the APSA's overall approach to assessment.

Asher Arian, one of Israel's most prominent political scientists, died on July 6 after a long illness, a four-year battle with cancer. He was 71. Asher Arian was a leading political scientist both in Israel and the United States.

For the first time in its history, the American Political Science Association held its annual meeting in Seattle, Washington, bringing together more than 6,000 political scientists from all over the world for a variety of programmatic, networking, and social events. From September 1 to September 4, scholars gathered in the beautiful Pacific Northwest to explore an exciting program focused on the theme The Politics of Rights. The 2011 Annual Meeting Program Chairs Frances Hagopian, Harvard University, and Bonnie Honig, Northwestern University, developed a theme that asked “the discipline bring its empirical and normative lenses to reflect on the domestic, comparative, and international dimensions of the complex politics of rights.”

Robert V. (“Bill”) Daniels died in Burlington, Vermont, on March 28, 2010, at the age of 84. He was a distinguished scholar and teacher at the University of Vermont for more than three decades, a respected administrator in various university positions, a president of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, and an elected state senator in the Vermont legislature for nearly a decade. He authored two dozen books on themes of fundamental importance, mostly on revolution and modernization, power and authority, leadership and opposition, participation and bureaucracy, representation and communication, and ideology and culture in the Soviet Union.

The Simulations and Role Play I track conducted a series of engaged discussions regarding what a successful simulation requires and what aspects are customizable, given the wide variety of contexts in which a simulation may be used. Recognizing the presence of significant variance in available time, institutional support (both financial and technical), student demographics, and class size, the track concluded that any successful simulation must include several core components, which can be presented in a variety of ways. Chief among these components are a balance between providing necessary structure and allowing room for engaged student creativity and the need for thorough, reflective debriefing.

Dr. Philip J. Schlessinger died at age 96 on September 22, 2010. He had taught political science at Los Angeles City College (LACC) for more than 60 years.

Mel Hinich, professor of political science and economics at the University of Texas at Austin and Mike Hogg Professor of Local Government, died in a tragic fall the evening of September 6, 2010.

Frank Tachau, one of the leading scholars of Middle Eastern politics, died on July 23, 2010, at the age of 80 in Sykesville, Maryland, after battling with multiple myeloma for two years. Born in Braunschweig, Germany, Professor Tachau moved with his family to Chicago at the age of seven in 1936. He studied at the University of Chicago, earning a bachelor's and a master's degree in political science. His MA thesis on the diplomacy of the Turkish Straits between 1936 and 1946 led to his remarkable Ph.D. dissertation, which offered one of the first scholarly accounts of Turkish nationalism in 1958. What distinguished Professor Tachau's analyses from others studying the Middle East was his extensive ethnographic work in the region. His unique language skills allowed him to learn modern Turkish very quickly in 1956 and opened the door for him to master historical Ottoman Turkish as well. During his multiple visits to the region, Professor Tachau studied the history of the Ottoman Empire and also noted the emerging institutions of the new Turkish republic. His extensive stays in the region equipped him with unique insights into the views of the country's political elite and the mechanisms of its fledgling democracy.

Representation is ubiquitous to modern politics. In democratic and non-democratic settings alike, power is delegated to—or appropriated by—some to act in the name of others. Yet relationships of representation often go awry and are always and everywhere subject to skepticism, disillusionment, and calls for fundamental reform. Despite periodic calls for new modes of direct participation in decision-making, however, representation is inseparable from politics on a mass scale. For the 2012 meetings, we ask political scientists to reconsider the normative ideals we attach to representation, the factors that impede the realization of those ideals in practice, and the potential for representative relationships—whether preserved, reformed, or radically overhauled—to translate citizens' collective aspirations into effective public initiatives. We issue this call with an eye on renewal—of cities, economies, institutions, and relationships between the governed and those who govern.

In a weekend of pedagogical fury, members of the Simulations and Role Play II track queried their peers to refine their ideas, presented data on the effectiveness of simulations as pedagogical tools, and shared methods of using simulations in the classroom. Paper presentations and discussions examined simulations from a variety of paradigmatic perspectives, including the use of simulations as summative assessment instruments, the role of competition in generating targeted learning outcomes, and the difficulty in balancing pedagogical objectives with design constraints.