Tulane University

This story originally appeared in the Tulane New Wave titled $2 million gift strengthens Latin American Studies at Tulane on September 14, 2017. Story by Mary Sparacello msparace@tulane.edu.

In a continuation of its efforts to strengthen Latin American studies at Tulane University, the Zemurray Foundation has given $2 million to establish two endowments at the Roger Thayer Stone Center for Latin American Studies.

“These gifts are part of a long and successful partnership between the Zemurray Foundation and the Stone Center,” says Thomas Reese, the Stone Center’s executive director and the Thomas F. and Carol Reese Distinguished Chair in Latin American Studies. “These endowments will continue to enhance Latin American studies as an area of excellence in interdisciplinary scholarship at Tulane.”

One $1 million gift will complete the endowment of the Samuel Z. Stone CIPR Support Trust for the Center for Inter-American Policy and Research, founded in 2007, which is the social sciences arm of the Stone Center. Its endowment supports CIPR’s academic research on critical policy issues facing the Americas and facilitate exchanges between scholars and policy-makers in Latin America. The donation honors the late Samuel Zemurray Stone, a political scientist, author, historian and longtime Tulane supporter.

The other $1 million gift endows the Doris Zemurray Stone Post-Doctoral Fellowship at the Stone Center. It will be awarded to scholars of archaeology, anthropology and/or linguistics, areas in which the late Doris Stone excelled. The fellowship will strengthen programs at the Stone Center and the Middle American Research Institute, where Doris Stone was a noted archaeologist and ethnographer, Reese says.

The foundation’s generosity is coming full circle—in one of his first donations to Tulane, Samuel Zemurray, Doris Stone’s father, enabled the establishment of MARI in 1924. The long-standing and generous support of the Zemurray Foundation has been a fundamental asset in establishing a position of national prominence for Tulane’s Latin American studies programs.