Princeton has been awarded a grant of $225,000 from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support a Sawyer Seminar on the Comparative Study of Cultures, entitled “Global Migration: The Humanities and Social Sciences in Dialogue.”
Sandra Bermann (left), the Cotsen Professor in the Humanities and professor of comparative literature, and Stephen Macedo, the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Politics and the University Center for Human Values, discuss “Migration: People and Cultures Across Borders.”
Led by Sandra Bermann, the Cotsen Professor in the Humanities and professor of comparative literature, and by a faculty steering committee spanning multiple disciplines, including history, sociology, comparative literature, English, politics and journalism, the seminar will take place in the 2018-19 academic year.
The seminar will take up several themes, such as narratives of migration; language, translation, and the law; and communities and social values. In addition, it will include a service and community outreach component, in which students and faculty will engage with local NGOs and government entities on the topic of migration.
The seminar will dovetail with an interdisciplinary research community on migration at the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies. Bermann and Stephen Macedo, the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Politics and the University Center for Human Values, discuss the initiative in this video.
The Mellon Foundation's Sawyer Seminars were established in 1994 to provide support for comparative research on the historical and cultural sources of contemporary developments. They bring together faculty, visitors, postdoctoral fellows and graduate students from a variety of fields mainly, but not exclusively, in the humanities and social sciences, for intensive study of subjects chosen by the participants.
