The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded $100,000 to Yale in support of a Sawyer Seminar on Genocide Studies, according to an announcement by Gustav Ranis, director of the Yale Center for International and Area Studies YCIAS.
The Sawyer Seminar, named in honor of John E. Sawyer, the Mellon Foundation's second president, provides opportunities within university settings for serious inquiry into the historical and cultural origins of contemporary developments.
Ben Kiernan, director of the Cambodian Genocide Program CGP based at YCIAS, will organize and direct the seminar with the help of a faculty steering committee. The seminar will meet weekly during 1998 and will be open to graduate students and faculty members. The Mellon funding will support a postdoctoral fellow and two graduate students, as well as enable young visiting scholars from abroad to participate in selected sessions.
Yale's Genocide Studies Seminar will apply a comparative and multidisciplinary approach to theoretical issues and case studies of genocide, exploring methods of description and analysis, documentation, recovery and prevention. Topics will include war crimes, race and ideology, concepts of utopia, forensics, archives, truth commissions, domestic and international tribunals, trauma, literature of the afflicted, humanitarian intervention and the impact of international politics.
"There has been too little formal effort to survey, in a comprehensive, rigorous and comparative fashion, the multi- disciplinary research that has been carried out on the various instances of genocide," notes Mr. Kiernan, who is also associate professor of Southeast Asian history.
For some years, Yale has been a leader in research and activities involving genocide and human rights, serving as the home to the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, the Orville H. Schell, Jr. Center for International Human Rights and the Cambodian Genocide Program.
The CGP was launched in 1994 after the U.S. Congress adopted the Cambodian Genocide Justice Act, which resulted in a grant competition for State Department funds. The project seeks to document the mass killings in Cambodia during the Democratic Kampuchea regime headed by Pol Pot 1975-79.