From the Charleston church shooting to the Syrian refugee crisis, to the Paris massacre, the past several months have been particularly difficult ones, both on the home front and abroad. A number of events were organized at the MacMillan Center to address these deeply disturbing situations.
In September, the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition hosted a panel of distinguished scholars to discuss Charleston and its aftermath, inequality, and racism. In October, a panel of five experts shared their views on the current Syrian migration catastrophe with an eye toward closing the gap between mere discussion and actual solutions. In November, we hosted Under Secretary General and Executive Director of U.N.-Women Dr. Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, who delivered a lecture and participated in a conversation on gender and violence with faculty and students.
On a brighter note, we hosted not one, but two, Henry L. Stimson Lectures on World Affairs. We partner with the Yale University Press to feature its notable forthcoming publications that align with our mission. David Mayhew, Sterling Professor Emeritus of Political Science, who is widely considered one of the leading scholars on the American Congress, gave a series of three lectures in September on his forthcoming book, The Imprint of Congress.
In November, Anne-Marie Slaughter, president and CEO of New America, shared some of her forthcoming book, The Chessboard and the Web, for the first time during the second of this year’s Henry L. Stimson Lectures on World Affairs in a three-part series titled “The Strategy of Connection.” Slaughter served as the director of policy planning for the United States Department of State from 2009 to 2011, the first woman to hold that position.
I am pleased to announce that the Russian Studies Project that was launched in January 2015 has been awarded $200,000 by Carnegie Corporation of New York to focus on “New Directions in Russian Studies.” This funding will allow us to build on the project’s initial successes by developing more robust programming and expanded opportunities for students and faculty on campus and in Russia, as well as reinforce the institutional foundation for the long-term sustainability of Russian studies at Yale.
The Center also received funding from the Japan Foundation Center for Global Partnership to launch a five-year effort titled, “Japan at the Crossroads: Yale Project on Japan’s Politics and Diplomacy.” The foreign policy and domestic issues faced by Japan require greater awareness and reflection by American scholars and thought leaders. Through this project, we seek to raise the level of interest and understanding in Japan and the exciting promise of stronger engagement between Japan and the U.S. In fact, our first major event featured a conversation on “The Arc of Post-World War II Japanese Diplomacy” with Ryozo Kato, former Japanese ambassador to the United States; Naoyuki Agawa, Professor of Law at Keio University; Koichi Hamada, Tuntex Emeritus Professor of Economics at Yale; and Paul Kennedy, J. Richardson Dilworth Professor of History at Yale.
I invite you to watch the videos of the events I have highlighted, as well as the interviews on The MacMillan Report featuring Anne-Marie Slaughter, David Mayhew, Deborah Bräutigam, and more.
With my best wishes,
Ian Shapiro
Henry R. Luce Director
Sterling Professor of Political Science