The Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund

By arrangement with the Provost, income from the Kempf Fund allows The MacMillan Center to support faculty initiative in organizing campus conferences, workshops, and lecture series on international topics in their fields of interest. Requests for Kempf funding for activities to be held in the next academic year should be made no later than March 1, 2010. Please submit your request, including a cover letter which identifies your affiliation with one of the Councils, Committees or Programs of The MacMillan Center, a brief narrative, proposed dates, and a budget.

Kempf Fund Guidelines for the 2010-2011 Academic Year

1) Kempf funds may be used for international conferences, colloquia, lecture series and workshops held at Yale, more specifically "all necessary expenses of selecting and inviting speakers, paying stipends, transportation and maintenance, and arranging, announcing and conducting of such conferences and publishing their papers and essential proceedings." Kempf funds may not be used to support off-campus events or travel to such events.

2) The MacMillan Center normally holds one competition in the winter to award Kempf funds for activities held during the following academic year. Please look ahead and plan adequately for 2010-2011 so that we will be able to evaluate more knowledgeably the full range of requests.

3) Submissions should be made in cooperation with a Council, Committee or Program of The MacMillan Center, meaning that anyone submitting a proposal should either plan to hold the activity under the auspices of, and preferably have a letter of support from the MacMillan Center unit. However, The MacMillan Center will also consider proposals which are not strictly tied to one MacMillan Center unit. The MacMillan Center will not consider proposals primarily from students who are organizing an event with some degree of faculty support.

4) In recent years the demand for Kempf funds has increased dramatically. If you do not receive the full amount of your request from the MacMillan Center-allocated Kempf funds, please do not approach the Office of the Provost for additional funds. On the other hand, both The MacMillan Center and the Provost urge you to supplement your Kempf fund request with other funds, including funds from outside Yale.

5) Kempf funds that you are awarded but do not use due to change of plans, overfunding, etc., will revert to The MacMillan Center. If you are awarded Kempf funds, your award letter will provide information concerning the appropriate acknowledgements, publicity, accounting, etc.

Intellectual Priorities for a Global Era: An Initiative of The Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale

From its genesis in the middle of the last century, The MacMillan Center (formerly YCIAS) has been the University's primary vehicle for encouraging interdisciplinary, area-focused research and teaching. The MacMillan Center's constituent councils, committees, centers, and programs have made tremendous contributions to our understanding of the world, and have trained generations of scholars. Language training and the humanities and social sciences disciplines have long been and will continue to be the foundation of The MacMillan Center's academic programs. Now, with so many of the world's most intractable and immediate problems requiring collaborative, interdisciplinary, and regionally-expert inquiry, The MacMillan Center intends to refocus its activities, so that all dimensions of these inquiries: research, teaching, convening, and publishing, will concentrate on the following three substantive areas. These topics are not intended to be the preserve of, nor exclusive to, any particular academic discipline or geographic area. Rather, they are intended to complement and draw upon the existing intellectual and financial resources resident in The MacMillan Center. One hallmark of these inquiries will be a conscious emphasis on the global implications of these topics.

Identity, Security, and Conflict

Religious, national, racial, ethnic, and other identities are among the most powerful sources of human motivation. They structure much human conflict, and they are integral to the age-old human search for meaning and security. Identities have proved more resistant to the forces of modernization and globalization than many influential theories predict, and they are not easily accounted for by the dominant explanatory models in the social sciences. Moreover, their normative dimensions are complex, because they often live in tension with widely held commitments to democracy and individual freedom. Nor are the various types of identity obviously alike, despite the common scholarly tendency to classify them together. We seek to illuminate identities from multiple disciplinary perspectives, account for their similarities, differences, and resilience, and explore their implications for the study of security and conflict-sub-national, national, and international.

Democracy: Past, Present, and Future

The last quarter of the twentieth century saw the advent of democracy in more than a third of the world's countries. Yet the great majority of the earth's population continues to be governed by undemocratic regimes. Moreover, the histories of fascism and communism remind us that democracy can often be a vulnerable achievement. Some of the newest democracies have already collapsed; others are creeping toward authoritarianism. In the older democracies, organized interests, urban blight, and violence at home and abroad challenge institutional capacities in unprecedented ways. The very idea of democratic citizenship is hotly contested. Some see it as a universal right, others as little more than a coveted ticket to membership in an exclusive club. There is no reason to assume that democracy's survival, let alone its spread, is guaranteed. We seek to advance our understanding of how to create and sustain democracy, how the tensions between democracy and other goods-notably efficiency and liberty-are best managed, and how established democracies can renew themselves in the face of internal and external challenges.

Justice and Distribution: Local, National, Regional, Global

In an era of unprecedented global integration-of markets, information, technology, and travel-the political organization of the world remains centered on nation states. As the main organs of political accountability and collective enforcement, national governments remain the central focus of demands for justice and redistribution. Governments confront many limits to their effectiveness in such a world, but also profound moral dilemmas. Should international courts and transnational legislative bodies be strengthened, and, if so, how and at what cost? To whom will they be accountable? How should demands to reduce inequities within countries be viewed if the predictable result is to increase inequities across borders? When public goods like clean air must be provided globally, how can national governments-often in competition with one another for power and influence and under massive pressure from private interests-do the providing and the regulating? We seek to study these moral and practical dilemmas from the vantage point of more than one discipline.