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Mellon Foundation Awards School of Humanities $175,000 for Sawyer Seminar

Starting in 2016, the Sawyer Seminar will create a temporary research center for cross-disciplinary, intensive study of how war is represented

The UC Irvine School of Humanities has received a $175,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to produce Documenting War, a year-long Sawyer Seminar that will explore 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 will begin in fall 2016 and will be led by project co-directors Carol Burke, professor of English, and Cecile Whiting, Chancellor’s Professor of art history. UCI is one of 11 universities to receive this prestigious grant in 2015.

The Mellon Foundation established Sawyer Seminars grants in 1994 to provide support for comparative research on the historical and cultural sources of contemporary developments. The grant will support a series of open lectures and workshops during the academic year, a post-doctoral position, and two graduate student pre-doctoral fellowships.

Documenting War builds upon the UCI School of Humanities’ strong foundation of war studies: Humanities Core, a year-long cross-disciplinary humanities course taken by students across the UCI campus, has taken war as its triennial theme; beginning last fall, the school sponsored a year-long faculty research group on war; and the school has recently held two large conferences on war. The Sawyer Seminar will expand the number of UCI faculty and graduate students participating in conversations on the representation of war and will take the discussion to the next level of regional, national, and international visibility and impact by including prominent visitors to share in research exchange.

“Under the leadership of Carol Burke and Cecile Whiting, our Sawyer Seminar will bring scholars into conversation with journalists and military personnel for what we expect to be lively, bilateral conversations in which prejudices can be exposed and new resources for understanding conflict, narration, and memory can be tested,” said Georges Van Den Abbeele, dean of the School of Humanities. “This seminar couldn’t come at a more important time as we commemorate the significant anniversaries of various wars— World Wars One and Two and the end of the Vietnam War.”

Read the full press release.