Programs and Initiatives
British Studies Program/Transitions to Modernity
The British Studies Program hosts a postdoctoral fellow and supports two ongoing fortnightly colloquia—British Historical Studies and Transitions to Modernity—in which faculty, graduate students, undergraduates, and visiting lecturers informally present and discuss developing scholarship and emerging themes. This year’s activities will include an ambitious series of visiting speakers and exciting programs in both of these colloquia, as well as participation in the NACBS conference in Montreal in November. In addition, on September 28–29, 2012, the program will participate in a conference in Chicago that will gather its Mellon Consortium colleagues from Yale, Berkeley, the University of Chicago, and the University of Texas at Austin.
In 2008 Transitions to Modernity initiated an exciting international partnership with the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris. This partnership includes 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 2012 EHESS fellow will teach a course in spring 2013. The next joint conference will take place at Yale in spring 2013.
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?” Emphasis is placed on research on new democratic institutions in developing countries. Ongoing international collaborative research in the program addresses topics such as academic leadership and building research capabilities. Other projects include the development and diffusion of databases; a project on the policy relevance of clientelism, patronage, and vote buying; and a project on political identities.
European Union Studies Program
The Yale Program in European Union Studies is devoted to furthering the knowledge of students, faculty, and other members of the Yale community about the European Union and European integration. Through a program of lectures, seminars, workshops, conferences, short-term visitors, and summer research grants, it seeks to promote greater knowledge about and understanding of the European Union—its past development, its current institutions and operations, and its future evolution. Particular attention is devoted to past, current, and future transatlantic relations between the United States and the European Union. In 2012–2013 the program will host a visiting fellow from the European Commission, Ewoud Sakkers, whose focus is on policy coordination for the implementation of competition rules by the Member States and the Commission, including review of enforcement cases and benchmarking of best practices in competition investigations in the EU in consideration of due process/human rights obligations.
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, eighteen graduate students and graduating seniors from elite universities in Moscow, Berlin, Shanghai, Paris, Tokyo, Tel Aviv, Istanbul, Cape Town, Cambridge, Mexico City, São Paulo, and New Delhi 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 academic achievement and demonstrated leadership and are expected to focus on fields with practical connections to promoting world peace, prosperity, and sustainability—including the social sciences, contemporary history, international relations, law and medicine, 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, interdisciplinary, 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.
Global Health Initiative
Announced in May 2009 by President Levin, the Yale Global Health Initiative (GHI) was the first major initiative of the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs at the MacMillan Center. Directed by Elizabeth Bradley, professor of public health, the Global Health Initiative is an interdisciplinary effort to improve the health of people around the globe through education and research.
The GHI has fostered exciting opportunities for students including new internships, educational programs, courses, and interest groups, as well as innovative faculty research in a wide range of areas of human health. More than eighty research programs are under way in more than sixty countries, with a particular commitment to work in low- and middle-income countries. The GHI defines global health as a field of study and practice focused on the health of human populations in a global context, transcending the perspectives and concerns of individual nations. The activities of the GHI are overseen by a Faculty Advisory Committee with members from a variety of departments and schools.
For students, the GHI has directly or indirectly fostered the development of twenty-eight new courses at the graduate level in global health, as well as a Graduate Certificate Program in Global Health and the Global Health Fellows Program for undergraduates. Additionally, the GHI provides funding for internships and fellowships through the GHI Field Experience Award and the GHI Yale Collaborative Action Project (Y-CAP), which are available to undergraduate and graduate students.
For faculty, the GHI has sponsored travel grants to initiate new international research collaborations, as well as a Global Health Research in Progress Working Group to foster interdisciplinary collaborations in global health across campus. A postdoctoral research associate program in global health was also created with four new researchers, each teaching a new graduate seminar in global health.
The GHI has also supported the growth of the Global Health Leadership Institute (GHLI), which seeks to develop leadership at Yale and around the world through innovative educational and research programs that strengthen health systems and ensure health equity and quality of care for all. On campus, GHLI hosts an annual conference focused on developing country strategies to improve health systems. GHLI also launched Strategic Thinking in Global Health, a course to prepare Yale students for leadership positions focused on improving health around the world. GHLI also has active research and education programs in China, Ethiopia, Ghana, Liberia, Rwanda, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States to improve health care delivery in these settings. GHLI provides opportunities for both faculty and students to engage with these programs.
Global Justice Program
Launched in 2008 by Thomas Pogge, Leitner Professor of Philosophy and International Affairs, this program robustly engages the themes of Justice and Distribution: Local, National, Regional, Global, one of the major rubrics framing the research agenda of the MacMillan Center. Involving Yale students and faculty as well as a changing cast of about a dozen visiting students and scholars, the Global Justice Program (GJP) engages in various projects. Academics Stand Against Poverty aims to mobilize the capacities and resources of academia toward the eradication of global poverty by contributing to a better understanding of why severe poverty persists, how it can be reduced, and why its reduction is morally imperative (www.academicsstand.org). Incentives for Global Health is elaborating the blueprint of a proposed pay-for-performance mechanism, the Health Impact Fund (HIF), that would offer pharmaceutical innovators the option to register any new product—thereby undertaking to offer it worldwide at a price no higher than the lowest feasible cost of production and distribution while becoming entitled to receive ten annual reward payments according to its product’s global health impact (www.healthimpactfund.org). Working with the NGO Global Financial Integrity, Illicit Financial Flows analyzes and seeks to find remedies against the huge losses rich and especially poor countries suffer from embezzlement and tax evasion/avoidance as facilitated by tax havens and secrecy jurisdictions. FemPov is working toward the development of new indexes for tracking poverty and gender equity, conducting consultative field work with Oxfam GB and two other NGOs in eighteen poor communities in six developing countries. Much of the GJP’s work can be tracked on the program’s Web site, www.yale.edu/macmillan/globaljustice.
Yale Center for the Study of Globalization
The Yale Center for the Study of Globalization (YCSG) is devoted to examining the impact of our increasingly integrated world on individuals, communities, and nations. YCSG’s purpose is to support the creation and dissemination of ideas for seizing globalization’s opportunities and overcoming its challenges. The center is particularly focused on practical policies to enable the world’s poorest and weakest citizens to share in the benefits brought by globalization. It also explores solutions to problems that, even if they do not result directly from integration, are global in nature and can therefore be effectively addressed only through international cooperation.
The essence of the center’s strategy is collaboration, both with the rich intellectual resources of the Yale community and with a variety of institutions and individuals across the globe. In all its initiatives YCSG strives to enhance the connection of Yale with the international institutions charged with management of global challenges; thus the center extends the intellectual reach of its work well beyond the Yale community, to connect with outside institutions and people as it endeavors to make its output policy relevant. YCSG engages with multilateral institutions and other global organizations in such a way as to contribute toward better understanding global problems and the formulation of their solutions as well as influencing the attitudes and actions of policymakers in favor of international cooperation.
The center’s core issues include global development, international trade, financial globalization, and global public goods, giving priority to issues of global governance, including mitigation of climate change and global peace and security. In the area of global peace and security, YCSG’s work is on nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament and halting global crime.
One of the center’s most dynamic and visible activities is its flagship publication, YaleGlobal Online (www.yaleglobal.yale.edu). This global multimedia instrument disseminates information about globalization to millions of readers in more than 215 countries and territories around the world. It is through YaleGlobal that the center contributes to the general intellectual enterprise of understanding globalization. YaleGlobal publishes original articles, aimed at the wider public, authored by world leaders, major foreign policy figures, and top specialists in politics, economics, diplomacy, business, health, and the environment.
Hellenic Studies Program
This program offers a comprehensive program of instruction in the modern Greek language at the elementary, intermediate, and advanced levels and cooperates closely with the Center for Language Study at Yale University for the development of technology-based teaching aids for the acquisition and mastering of modern Greek and the enrichment of other Hellenic-oriented courses. In addition, it offers a variety of courses in modern Greek literature and culture as well as in Ottoman and modern Greek history, providing students with the opportunity to study postclassical Greece in a broad geographical, historical, and comparative context. The program also fosters courses in other departments, including Byzantine history and Byzantine history of art. The 2012 Stavros Niarchos Foundation Lecture will be delivered by Sir Michael Llewellyn-Smith. His lecture, entitled “Critical Decade: Politics, War, and Schism in Venizelos’s Greece, 1910–1920,” commemorates the 100th anniversary of the start of the Balkan War and the ninetieth anniversary of the end of the Greco-Turkish war of 1919–22.
Georg Walter Leitner Program in International and Comparative Political Economy
The Georg Walter Leitner Program in International and Comparative Political Economy promotes research and teaching about the interactions between politics and economics around the world. 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 a number of departments and schools across the University, including especially 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 and several conferences each year at which the leading research in related fields is presented and discussed. Recent conferences have focused on topics such as the Economics, Law, and Politics of the GATT/WTO; Distributive Politics; Redistribution, Public Goods, and Political Market Failures; and Non-Democratic Regimes. The program also hosts a faculty visitor and postdoctoral fellowship program, which brings a combination of leading political economy researchers and younger scholars in the field to Yale for one-year appointments. These visiting scholars present innovative new interdisciplinary work to the Yale community, collaborate on research with Yale faculty and students, and offer related courses for Yale students. The Leitner Program also hosts a working paper series featuring faculty and graduate student work-in-progress, sponsors graduate and undergraduate student research fellowships, and provides undergraduate senior essay assistance. The coming 2012–2013 academic year will see a continuation of these activities as well as new initiatives such as a monthly research lunch for political economy graduate students and new undergraduate and graduate courses in political economy taught by Leitner faculty.
Program on Order, Conflict, and Violence
The Program on Order, Conflict, and Violence is an interdisciplinary research program headquartered at and supported by the MacMillan Center. It fosters pioneering and rigorous theoretical and empirical research on human conflict in all its dimensions by promoting innovative approaches on questions related to the breakdown, emergence, and consolidation of local, national, or transnational political order; the origins, dynamics, and consequences of political polarization; the determinants of conflict actors and strategies; and the dynamics of violent escalation and de-escalation. The program encourages research that is question-driven, methodologically eclectic, and serious about context.
The program offers residential predoctoral and postdoctoral fellowships and organizes various activities, from lectures to workshops and conferences. Since its establishment in 2004, the program has organized more than two hundred talks and a dozen conferences and workshops; hosted more than thirty fellows and visiting scholars; and nurtured tens of graduate and undergraduate student associates. Through its combined activities, the program has helped to make Yale the preeminent site for cutting-edge research on questions related to order, conflict, and violence.
Programs in International Educational Resources (PIER)
Programs in International Educational Resources (PIER) draws on Yale’s extensive resources, including its outstanding faculty and staff, 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, and curriculum development. 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 a gift from 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 international 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 promotes 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 Frederick Douglass Book Prize, an annual award for the best nonfiction book written on the subject of slavery, resistance, or abolition.
For the 2012–2013 academic year the Gilder Lehrman Center plans to offer a wide range of events and fellowship opportunities. In collaboration with the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the center is hosting an eight-day Public History Institute in July 2012, which brings together Yale students, historians, and public history professionals to explore issues in interpreting African American history for the public. Throughout the year, students will continue to work on interpretive projects with museums across the country. In November the center will host its fourteenth Annual International Fall Conference, Abolition, Past and Present: Scholars, Activists, and the Challenge of Contemporary Slavery and Trafficking. The center will also feature other lectures and programs given by its growing number of visiting scholars, research affiliates, and graduate student fellowship recipients. Highlights include the development of a new visiting fellowship on modern-day slavery and human trafficking. In addition to public programs, the center plans to continue its major outreach initiatives for elementary and secondary school teachers, including a Teaching American History Grant project—Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness—for New Haven area teachers.
