The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded $100,000 to Yale in support of a Sawyer Seminar on "Millennium and Millennialism: Motifs and Movements," according to an announcement by Gustav Ranis, director of the Yale Center for International and Area Studies YCIAS.
The Sawyer Seminar program -- named in honor of John E. Sawyer, the Mellon Foundation's third president -- provides opportunities within university settings for serious inquiry into the historical and cultural origins of significant contemporary developments. Fifteen institutions across the country were invited to submit proposals for Sawyer Seminars in 1996; both of Yale's proposals received funding. The approval of the other seminar -- on "Comparative Genocide Studies" -- was announced earlier this year by YCIAS.
Abbas Amanat, professor of Middle Eastern History and chair of the Council on Middle East Studies of YCIAS, will organize and direct the Millennium Seminar, with the assistance of a multi- disciplinary faculty steering committee. The Mellon funding will support two graduate students, a postdoctoral fellow, and visiting scholars from the U.S. and abroad who will participate in the sessions. The seminar will meet biweekly during calendar year 1998 and will be open to faculty and graduate students.
From both historical and religious perspectives, the turn of the century and the advent of the third Christian millennium is considered as an important symbolic moment in many societies, even those with different calendars and time reckonings. "Millennium and Millennialism" will look at previous turn-of-the-century experiences -- both religious and secular -- in the Middle East, Asia, Africa, Latin America and the West, and the seminar will explore how these common cultural paradigms gave rise to new social and political movements. Participants will also consider the effects of the upcoming millennium change on contemporary society.
Among the topics that will be explored in the Millennium Seminar are chaos and order, apocalypse, messianic prophets and themes, resistance and reform, America as the promised land, Buddhist and Daoist legacies, Islamic and Christian influences, the sacred and the profane, scientific socialism, fundamentalism and new millennial conflicts.
For further information, call the Council on Middle East Studies at 432-6252.