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.

‘€œThese 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. ‘€œThese 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.