Overview
Since 2015, the UCI School of Humanities has presented three Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminars. Faculty project directors have come from a range of disciplines –English/Literary Journalism, Art History, Asian American Studies, History, Anthropology and Geography. Each year-long set of activities built intellectual community across campus, connected scholars and communities, and generated new research. The Sawyer Seminars at UCI provided funding for one postdoctoral scholar and two PhD students each.
The Mellon Foundation’s Sawyer Seminars were established in 1994 to provide support for comparative research on the historical and cultural sources of contemporary developments. Named in honor of the Mellon’s long-serving third president, John E. Sawyer, the seminars have brought together faculty, foreign visitors, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students from a variety of fields, mainly, but not exclusively, in the arts, humanities, and interpretive social sciences, for intensive study of subjects chosen by the participants. Sawyer Seminars are, in effect, temporary research centers.
Black Reconstruction as Portal
Black Reconstruction as a Portal was the year-long seminar at UCI that explored the global salience of visions of Black Reconstruction as a portal between the crisis that marks our current predicament and the freedom dreams of those who have taken to the streets, insisting that another world is still possible. Through a faculty/graduate student reading group, this seminar explored W.E.B. Du Bois’s historical study, Black Reconstruction, as a conduit to our present global crisis. The seminar was led by Damien Sojoyner, Professor of Anthropology, and Yousuf Al-Bulushi, Assistant Professor of Global & International Studies.
Suffer Well
Suffer Well was a year-long seminar organized by the UCI Center for Medical Humanities to bring together scholars, artists, and medical practitioners to explore human suffering as both the limit of communication and expression and the event horizon from which new forms of sociality and social formation may be made possible. Suffer Well created a dialogue around how different disciplines attend to and develop modes of understanding suffering and react to experiences of suffering.
Documenting War
Documenting War was a temporary research center for cross-disciplinary, intensive study of how war is represented. Funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the year-long Sawyer Seminar explored the genres, rhetoric, and real effects of wartime documentation and postwar reflection, as carried out by journalists, soldiers, civilians, and artists in verbal, visual, and mixed media forms. The seminar was led by project co-directors Carol Burke, Professor of English, and Cécile Whiting, Professor of Art History and Visual Studies.