MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies

The Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale is the University’s focal point for promoting teaching and research on all aspects of international affairs, societies, and cultures around the world. It draws its strength by tapping the interests and combining the intellectual resources of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and of the professional schools. The MacMillan Center seeks to make understanding the world outside the borders of the United States, and the role of the United States in the world, an integral part of liberal education and professional training at the University. It provides six undergraduate majors: African Studies, East Asian Studies, Latin American and Iberian Studies, Modern Middle East Studies, Russian and East European Studies, and South Asian Studies. At the graduate level, the MacMillan Center provides three master’s degree programs: African Studies, East Asian Studies, and European and Russian Studies. The MacMillan Center also sponsors four graduate certificates of concentration: African Studies, European Studies, Latin American and Iberian Studies, and Modern Middle East Studies. Language training is an integral component of each of the degree and certificate programs.

Beyond the nine degree programs and other curricular contributions, the MacMillan Center has numerous interdisciplinary faculty councils, centers, committees, and programs. These provide opportunities for scholarly research and intellectual innovation and encourage faculty and student interchange for undergraduates as well as graduate and professional students.

The MacMillan Center extracurricular programs deepen and extend this research-teaching nexus of faculty and students at Yale, with more than 700 lectures, conferences, workshops, roundtables, symposia, film, and art events each year. Virtually all of these are open to the community at large. Its annual flagship lectures, the Coca-Cola World Fund Lecture and the George Herbert Walker, Jr. Lecture in International Studies, bring a number of prominent scholars and political figures to the Yale campus. The MacMillan Center reaches a large academic and public audience with a variety of publications including journals, monographs, working papers, and books.

Its Program in International Educational Resources (PIER) reaches out to the larger public, especially targeting educators at the primary and secondary (K–12) as well as college levels, with professional and curricular development training programs and services, in addition to teaching materials and electronic resources.

The MacMillan Center produces The MacMillan Report, an Internet show that showcases Yale faculty in international and areas studies and their research in a one-on-one interview format.

The MacMillan Center also publishes YaleGlobal Online. This global multimedia instrument disseminates information about globalization to millions of readers in more than 215 countries and territories around the world. YaleGlobalpublishes original articles aimed at the wider public, authored by Yale faculty, world leaders, major foreign policy figures, and top specialists in politics, economics, diplomacy, business, health, and the environment.

The number of international visiting faculty with the MacMillan Center has also increased dramatically over the past years. In cooperation with several special externally funded programs facilitating exchanges, the MacMillan Center has brought more than seventy-five scholars each year from a range of disciplines and numerous countries to join the Yale community for periods ranging from six weeks to a full academic year. In addition to research, they collectively teach more than forty courses annually.

An enduring commitment of the MacMillan Center is to enable students to spend time abroad to undertake research and other academically oriented international and area studies-related activities. Each year it typically awards more than $3 million to more than five hundred Yale students for research, language and other study, and internships abroad.

The Fox International Fellowship Program is a two-way exchange between Yale and 13 partner universities—Moscow State University, Freie Universität Berlin, University of Cambridge, University of Tokyo, Fudan University, Institut d’études Politiques de Paris, El Colegio de México, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Bog¯aziçi University, Tel Aviv University, Universidade de São Paulo, University of Cape Town, and University of Ghana. The fellowship promotes the development of individual relationships and understanding among future leaders on which world peace and prosperity depend. The intention is for the Fox International Fellowship Program to expand in the coming years to achieve worldwide status and coverage, adding other equally distinguished universities in other countries.

Additionally, the MacMillan Center is increasing its capacity to provide fellowships for graduate and professional students to come from various parts of the world to pursue a degree at Yale. Through its success in federal grant programs, the MacMillan Center is able to support fourteen to sixteen U.S. citizens enrolled in advanced degree programs with intensive language study through the Higher Education Act’s Title VI, Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships.

The MacMillan Center is not a school, and most of its faculty have appointments in other units of the University. It works with roughly 250 faculty across the University in any given year and supports twenty-eight ladder faculty positions, as well as more than seventy-five visiting scholars in different arts and sciences fields. The MacMillan Center has also appointed many language faculty to multiyear appointments in specific international fields and languages. Its regional councils regularly teach all levels of several foreign languages, including Dutch, Hindi, Indonesian, modern Greek, Sanskrit, Swahili, Urdu, Vietnamese, Yorùbá, and Zulu. It also collaborates with the Center for Language Study (CLS) in supporting Directed Independent Language Study of more than another 60 languages for undergraduate, graduate, and professional school students. Additionally, regional councils and language faculty participate actively in the Cornell, Columbia, and Yale shared course initiative led by CLS, using distance-learning technology to send Dutch, Modern Greek, Yorùbá, and Zulu, and to receive Bengali, Romanian, and Tamil.

A number of international, interdisciplinary professorships were created at the MacMillan Center in 2002 by the University. To date, four have been endowed—the William K. Lanman, Jr. Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs; the Leitner Professor of International Law, Politics, and International Studies; the Howard H. Leach Professor of Economics and International Affairs; and the Leitner Professor of Philosophy and International Affairs.