The agreement was signed by Dr. Santos Gracia Villar on behalf of the Board of Trustees of the European University of the Atlantic (UNEATLANTICO), and Dr. Pauline Rankin, dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Carleton University, an academic institution based in Ottawa, Canada.
Under the agreement, the two institutions will explore opportunities to collaborate in areas of mutual academic interest and enhance their international engagement. This is aimed at promoting agreements that offer the possibility of developing research projects focused on innovation, as well as encouraging exchanges between faculty and students.
The agreement also opens a new avenue of collaboration in the field of African Studies, converging UNEATLANTICO with the Universidade Internacional do Cuanza (UNIC), located in the center of Angola, into the FUNIBER Chair of Ibero-American Studies and Iberophony, which is directed by F. Álvaro Durántez Prados, professor at the university from Santander, who was present at the signing ceremony. Carleton University in turn also has an Institute of African Studies.
Founded in 1942, Carleton University has a research- and teaching-oriented approach that enables its students to anticipate and lead change. The agreement was signed by the dean of the Faculty of Arts, responsible for the Department of Foreign Languages. In this way, the European University of the Atlantic takes a new step towards the international arena, adding to the more than 100 agreements it has already reached with international universities.
In addition to the agreement signed with Carleton, the UNEATLANTICO delegation held an in-depth meeting with the University of Ottawa to strengthen their collaboration and draw up a future memorandum of understanding along the same lines as the one signed with Carleton. The meeting was attended by the Faculty of Arts and the Department of Modern Languages, directed by hispanist Luis Abanto. This opens up a horizon of short-term fruitful cooperation within the field of Spanish language teaching.
Through these two steps of inter-university collaboration, UNEATLANTICO has taken firm root in Canada within two of the country’s leading universities, located in the federal capital, and is now looking forward to a permanent presence in the university system of a G7 in North America. This is all carried out in such a strategic area as the teaching of Spanish and the education of Spanish teachers.
The University of Cantabria is also working with the Iberoamerican University Foundation (FUNIBER) in this endeavor. To coincide with this visit, the joint Cultural Work of the two Spanish institutions inaugurated the exhibition “Goya and Dalí: from whimsy to nonsense”, comprising 80 engravings by Spanish masters Francisco de Goya and Salvador Dalí, inaugurated in the presence of Ander Gil, President of the Spanish Senate. The Spanish Embassy in Canada and its ambassador, Alfredo Martínez Serrano, are also collaborating in these efforts.