To: College Faculty
From: Tim Stowell, Dean of Humanities
Re: Call for proposals for Sawyer Seminars
Below is an announcement regarding the 2008-2009 competition for the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s Sawyer Seminars Program. As part of a select group of universities, UCLA has been invited to submit proposals for two seminars. These nominations must be submitted by the Executive Vice Chancellor’s Office in coordination with the College Deans and since only two proposals will be accepted there will be an internal review of all proposals by the College leadership to select the two that will be submitted to Mellon.
To be considered, proposals must be submitted by January 18, 2008 to Jennifer Drake, Director of Corporate and Foundation Relations for the College, at jdrake@support.ucla.edu or 1309 Murphy Hall Box 951413. All proposals must be accompanied by a nomination letter from your department chair or director. Jennifer is coordinating the nomination process and works with the Mellon Foundation on a regular basis so any questions regarding the fellowship or this process can be directed to her.
Application Details:
Grants will not exceed $150,000 for each seminar that is approved.
Budgets should provide for a postdoctoral fellowship to be awarded for the year the seminar meets
Two dissertation fellowships for graduate students should be awarded for the seminar year or the year that follows
The amount for postdoctoral fellowship awards and dissertation fellowship stipends should follow institutional practices
Travel and living expenses for short stays by visiting scholars and the costs of coordinating the seminar, including those incurred for speakers and their travel, may be included
The grants may not be used for the costs of released time for regular faculty participants
Interested faculty should submit a 3-5 page narrative proposal that addresses:
The scholarly importance of the subject to be examined
The central questions to be addressed
The cases to be compared (e.g., nations, regions, social aggregates, time periods) and the rationale for the comparisons that are selected
The thematic “threads” that will run through the seminar
The institution’s resources and suitability for the proposed seminar the procedures to be used in selecting graduate and postdoctoral fellows
The Mellon Foundation’s Sawyer Seminars program was established in 1994 to provide support for comparative research on the historical and cultural sources of contemporary developments. The seminars provide an opportunity for intensive study of subjects chosen by the participants. Named in honor of the Foundation’s long-serving third president, John E. Sawyer, they have brought together faculty members, foreign visitors, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students from a variety of fields mainly, but not exclusively, in the humanities and social sciences. The Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies was awarded funding for the last UCLA Sawyer Seminar Series for Disputation: Ways of Arguing In and Out of the University. The seminar is being held in 2007-2008 and is a series of conversations on the topic of disputation from philosophical, literary, and social perspectives.
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The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
JOHN E. SAWYER SEMINARS
ON THE COMPARATIVE STUDY OF CULTURES
Purpose: The Mellon Foundation’s Sawyer Seminars program was established in 1994 to provide support for comparative research on the historical and cultural sources of contemporary developments. The seminars, named in honor of the Foundation’s long-serving third president, John E. Sawyer, have brought together faculty, foreign 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. This program aims to engage productive scholars in comparative inquiry that would (in ordinary university circumstances) be difficult to pursue, while at the same time avoiding the institutionalization of such work in new centers, departments, or programs.
Program Activities: To date, 90 seminars have been funded. Their subjects have ranged widely, as suggested by the following examples:
the public power exerted by oligarchs, tycoons, and magnates
foreign languages and literatures of North America
autobiography and the forging of identities
genocide
“retroactive justice”
transitions from dictatorships to democracies
the transmission of European national identities to other peoples and countries
the role of the military in political and social change
how particular illnesses and disabilities come to be defined as public health issues
the effects of mass media structures on the maintenance of civil society
violence and state power in the Byzantine, Frankish and Islamic empires
the connections between domestic urban problems and global economic developments
millennialism
the circulation of poetry
the effects of scientific and technological innovation on rural culture
world English and global literary culture
contact and cultural transmission in the “axial age” Mediterranean
local labor markets in globalizing economies.
The maximum grant award for each Sawyer Seminar is $150,000 (see budget section below for further details).
Each seminar normally meets for one year (though some have continued for longer periods). Faculty participants have largely come from the humanities and social sciences, although some of the most successful and provocative seminars have also drawn on faculty members from professional schools. Seminar leaders are encouraged also to invite participants from nearby institutions. As the Foundation reviews proposals, preference will be given to those that include concrete plans for engaging participants with diverse affiliations.
Sawyer Seminar awards provide support for one postdoctoral fellow to be recruited through a national competition, and for the dissertation research of two graduate students. It is expected that the graduate students will be active participants in the seminars, and the seminars’ contribution to graduate education in the humanities and social sciences will be carefully considered even though they are not intended to be organized as official credit-bearing courses.
Seminars are not expected to produce a written product.
Selection and Award Process: Institutions will be invited to submit proposals for a specified number of Sawyer Seminars (usually one or two depending on the number of institutions being invited to participate in a given round). It is expected that university administrators and others will communicate the Foundation’s invitation and the particulars of the program broadly to the faculty. Institutions will decide through an internal process which proposals they will submit to the Foundation for consideration.
Proposals should describe: (1) the scholarly importance of the subject to be examined; (2) the central questions to be addressed; (3) the cases to be compared (e.g., nations, regions, social aggregates, time periods) and the rationale for the comparisons that are selected; (4) the thematic “threads” that will run through the seminar; (5) the institution’s resources and suitability for the proposed seminar; and (6) the procedures to be used in selecting graduate and postdoctoral fellows. Additionally, proposals should include a budget and a well developed preliminary plan for the seminar that outlines the specific topics to be addressed in each session and provides the names and qualifications of the scholars who would ideally participate.
After they are submitted to the Foundation, proposals will be reviewed by an advisory committee of distinguished scholars. In recent competitions, approximately one-third of proposals have been recommended for funding with only minor revisions requested. (In a very small number of cases the committee has recommended that a substantially revised proposal be resubmitted for later consideration, but with no guarantee that it will ultimately be approved.) The committee’s recommendations are then put before the Mellon Foundation’s Board of Trustees for its approval.
Following approval by the Foundation’s Trustees, funds will be disbursed to the host institution. Past experience suggests that it can take a year or more to organize the seminars.
Budget: Funding requests should not exceed $150,000 for each seminar. It is expected that each seminar’s budget will provide for a postdoctoral fellowship to be awarded for the year the seminar meets, and two dissertation fellowships for graduate students to be awarded for the seminar year or the year that follows. The amount for postdoctoral fellowship awards and dissertation fellowship stipends should follow institutional practices. Travel and living expenses for short stays by visiting scholars and the costs of coordinating the seminar, including those incurred for speakers and their travel, may be included. The grants may not, however, be used for the costs of released time for regular faculty participants, or for indirect costs.