Special Programs and Initiatives
Program in Agrarian Studies
One of the best-known and most admired interdisciplinary programs in the social sciences in the country, the Program in Agrarian Studies was begun in 1991 as an experimental effort to reshape how a new generation of scholars understands rural life and society. The program combines social science research with popular knowledge and reasoning about poverty, subsistence, cultivation, justice, art, law, property, ritual life, cooperation, resource use, and state action. The core of the program’s activities is a weekly colloquium organized around an annual theme, where participants focus on the study of papers written by invited specialists. In addition, the Program in Agrarian Studies appoints five postdoctoral fellows annually, offers a popular, team-taught graduate seminar, and supports student research.
British Studies Program/Transitions to Modernity
The British Studies Program supports two ongoing fortnightly colloquia—British Historical Studies and Transitions to Modernity—that include faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates. This year’s activities will include exciting programs in both ongoing colloquia, including hosting a regional conference on economic modernization in British history, participating in a British Studies Consortium conference in Chicago, and cosponsoring an international conference with Royal Holloway College of the University of London on Religious and Civil Liberty in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Britain.
Transitions to Modernity will, in 2008, initiate an exciting international linkage with the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. This linkage will include running parallel yearlong colloquia, a term-long visitor from Paris, the possibility of two Yale faculty members visiting EHESS for a month each year, and a yearly conference. The first of these conferences will take place in Paris in June 2008.
Program on Democracy
The Program on Democracy encourages work at the intersection of democratic theory and empirical research on democracy. It supports research in which answers to the question “How should democracy work?” are informed by answers to the question “How does democracy work?” Particular interest is given to research on new democracies in developing countries. Ongoing international collaborative research in the program includes “building research capabilities” and “academic leadership”; the development and diffusion of databases through data archive; a project on clientelism, patronage, and vote buying—policy relevance; and a project on political identities.
Ethnicity, Race, and Migration
The program in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration enables students to combine a disciplinary requirement of a first major with an interdisciplinary, comparative study of forces that have created a multicultural, multiethnic, and multiracial world.
The major emphasizes familiarity with the intellectual traditions and debates surrounding the concepts of ethnicity, nationality, and race; grounding in both the history of migration and its contemporary manifestations; and knowledge of the cultures, structures, and peoples formed by these migrations.
European Union Studies Program
This program examines the many aspects of the European Union: its past development, its current institutions and operations, and its future evolution. Visiting scholars and Yale faculty, as well as graduate and undergraduate students, consider the program one of the most influential centers for timely research on this dynamic region. Program elements include a scholar-in-residence, short-term scholarly exchanges, faculty/graduate student workshops, graduate and undergraduate student research grants, a Web site, and working paper series.
Fox International Fellowship Program
Begun as an exchange between Yale and Moscow State University in 1989, the Fox Fellowships are intended to identify and develop future leaders who will contribute to decisions affecting global policies and international relations. On average, fourteen graduate students and graduating seniors from elite universities in Moscow, Berlin, Shanghai, Paris, Tokyo, Tel Aviv, Istanbul, Cape Town, Cambridge, and Mexico City come to Yale to do independent research each year, while a number of Yale students travel to the fellowship’s schools abroad.
The Fox Fellows are selected on the basis of intellect, character, and demonstrated leadership and are expected to focus on fields with the most practical connections to promoting world peace and prosperity—including politics, contemporary history, economics, international relations, law, management, environmental policy, and finance.
Genocide Studies Program
The horrors of genocide need to be studied and understood in order that such atrocities can one day be eradicated. The Genocide Studies Program (GSP) seeks to put world-wide genocidal events into comparative context and to make them more comprehensible, in the hope that research will yield potential “markers,” or telltale signs, to enable the prevention of future disasters before they gain momentum.
Begun in 1998 as an expansion of Yale’s Cambodian Genocide Program, the GSP today conducts research, weekly seminars, and conferences on comparative, inter-disciplinary, historical, and policy issues relating to the phenomenon of genocide; provides training to researchers from afflicted regions; and maintains a highly praised Web site and genocide database.
Yale Center for the Study of Globalization
The Yale Center for the Study of Globalization opened its doors in September of 2001 and has, since its inception, supported the study of globalization both within the University and through collaborations with institutions and organizations outside the University.
The center is devoted to examining the impact of an increasingly integrated world on individuals, communities, and nations. Its purpose is to support the creation and dissemination of ideas for seizing the opportunities and overcoming the challenges resulting from globalization’s impact on the world’s people and places. In the course of its work, the center aims to encourage the generation of ideas and concrete proposals that will result in enabling the poorest and weakest peoples to participate in the opportunities presented by globalization. The center also sees as part of its mission the study of problems that, even if they do not result directly from globalization, are global in nature and can therefore be effectively addressed only through international cooperation.
The center serves the Yale University community by fostering interdisciplinary activities on campus that are designed to explore the many aspects of globalization as well as to assist in Yale’s effort to become a more international institution.
Hellenic Studies Program
This program offers courses on post-classical Greece, the history of the Balkans including Byzantine civilization, and modern Greece as a European Union member, as well as modern Greek language courses that incorporate contemporary Greek culture and history. Study options available to students wishing to immerse themselves in Greek culture include full-year and termlong language study fellowships in Greece for undergraduate, graduate, and professional students, and a full complement of conferences and multimedia language materials.
During 2007–2008 the Hellenic Studies Program will continue with its fourth Niarchos Lecture, delivered by Professor Mark Mazower from Columbia University. In October the program will host the twentieth biannual symposium of the Modern Greek Studies Association of North America. The symposium will be accompanied by two exhibits and a concert; George Kordis’s neo-byzantine paintings will be exhibited in Luce Hall Common Room while a collection of archival materials from the Truman Library will be displayed at the Memorabilia Room in Sterling Library. Accomplished soprano Elly Paspalla will give a concert on October 20. Other events for the fall term include a tribute to Maria Callas, film showings, and a talk on Greek-Iranian relations.
Georg Walter Leitner Program in International and Comparative Political Economy
International and comparative political economy are critical and fast-growing areas of inquiry in the social sciences today, making the Leitner Program one of the most popular and important MacMillan Center initiatives. The program develops innovative activities and collaborations among faculty and students in the departments of Economics and Political Science and the Law School to reflect the increasing synergies of these disciplines worldwide. The many activities offered by the Leitner Program include a weekly political economy workshop, a Web site with working papers featuring faculty and graduate student work in progress, graduate and undergraduate student research fellowships, undergraduate senior essay assistance, and short-term visiting scholars who present relevant interdisciplinary work to the Yale community.
Program on Order, Conflict, and Violence
The Program on Order, Conflict, and Violence is an interdisciplinary research program headquartered at the MacMillan Center and supported by the MacMillan Center, the Institution for Social and Policy Studies (ISPS), and the department of Political Science. Established in 2004, its mission is to promote innovative research on questions related to the rise and collapse of order, including the material and nonmaterial origins and consequences of polarization; the causes of the breakdown, emergence, and consolidation of local, national, or transnational political order; the determinants of strategies, types, and consequences of group conflict; and the likelihood of their violent escalation. The Program on Order, Conflict, and Violence seeks to straddle existing boundaries by fostering pioneering and rigorous theoretical and empirical research on human conflict in all its dimensions; its goal is to make Yale the preeminent institution for cutting-edge research on these issues. It offers residential research fellowships and will organize various activities, including lectures, speaker series, workshops, and conferences.
Programs in International Educational Resources (PIER)
Programs in International Educational Resources (PIER) draws on Yale’s extensive resources to develop and implement programs, services, and resources designed to advance understanding of international and world regional issues through outreach to education, business, media, and the public. PIER has professionals who focus on Africa, East Asia, Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East.
PIER provides a wide range of programs and services, including summer institutes, professional development workshops, production and evaluation of educational materials, curriculum development, and a Resource Center, as well as a lending library of videos, textbooks, and other materials. PIER also provides training and consulting services and programs for companies that do business internationally.
Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition
Established in 1998 through the generosity of Yale alumni Richard Gilder and Lewis Lehrman, the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition is dedicated to fostering education and research regarding all aspects of inter-national slavery, especially the chattel slave system, its destruction, and its legacies. Through educational outreach, publications, international conferences, cultural events, and scholarly lectures, the Gilder Lehrman Center seeks to promote an improved understanding of the role of slavery, slave resistance, and abolition in the founding of the modern world by encouraging intellectual exchange among scholars, teachers, and public historians. The center also offers research fellowships to graduate students, hosts visiting scholars, provides professional development workshops for secondary school teachers, and funds the prestigious Frederick Douglass Book Prize, an annual award for the best nonfiction book written on the subject of slavery, resistance, or abolition.
For the 2007–2008 academic year, the Gilder Lehrman Center plans to offer a wide range of events and fellowship opportunities. Partnering with the Yale Center for British Art in November 2007, the center is hosting its Ninth Annual International Conference titled “The Legacies of Slavery and Emancipation: Jamaica in the Atlantic World,” focusing on the exhibition “Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Mendes Belisario and His Worlds.” In the spring of 2008 the center will hold the fourth annual David Brion Davis Lecture Series on the History of Slavery, Race, and Their Legacies. The center will also feature other lectures and programs throughout the year given by its growing number of visiting scholars, research affiliates, and graduate student fellowship recipients. In addition to public programs, the center plans to continue its major outreach initiatives working with elementary and secondary school teachers during the third and final year of the Teaching American History Grant project, Slavery and Freedom in American History and Memory and through the NEH’s Landmarks of American History Professional Development Workshops, Beyond Amistad: The Struggle for African American Citizenship, 1770–1850.
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