Yale Mellon Sawyer Seminar: February Newsletter
Dear Colleagues,
February brings the beginning of the Spring semester at Yale and many new beginnings to our project as well. We
We are delighted to have hosted Sara Wylie, Associate professor in sociology/anthropology and health sciences at Northeastern University as our speaker this month. Prof. Wylie delivered a stimulating talk entitled “Enacting Environmental Data Justice.” Her presentation, as well as her conversations with Professors Karen Seto (Yale), Deepti Chatti (Humbolt State), and Marccus Hendricks (University of Maryland), is now available on our Youtube channel. Recordings from our previous lecture series are available there, too.
This month we are excited to welcome the Seminar’s postdoctoral fellow, Michael Faciejew, a historian of architecture who has recently completed his Ph.D. at Princeton. Michael will teach a new set of courses based on the seminar during the 2021-22 academic year, and will help develop events and programming for the project. Look out for a future conversation on his research and teaching on the The Order of Multitudes website.
We also awarded three inaugural seed grants to students: Matthew Dudley, a graduate student in the History department is working on “Into the Anti-Archive: Explorations of the (Early) Modern Cairo Geniza”; Colton Valentine, a graduate student in English, is exploring “Access Precedes Essence: Too Little Information”; and Henry Jacob (YC '21) is researching “The Zone Before the Canal: Ambrose W. Thompson's Quest to Colonize Panama Through Knowledge.” There will be another open call for submissions in the spring and we encourage both graduate and undergraduate students to apply.
Four undergraduate interns — Iman Iftikhar, Alexa Stanger, Sasha Semina, and Caroline Magavern — joined the Scrolls & Leaves podcast team. They will each develop their own “chatroom” that amplifies aspects of the main podcast episodes, and also collaboratively develop a new episode in close conjunction with the Sawyer Seminar. We will notify you as soon as these episodes drop!
Currently on The Order of Multitudes website are interviews with Professor Manan Ahmed, Archivist Michael Lotstein, Dr. Catherine DeRose, and Ph.D. Candidate Sarah Qidwai on our February theme of Digital Storytelling. Looking ahead to March, our theme will be Rogue Archives. We will feature interviews with Professor Denise Ho, Professor Nana Osei Quarshie, our own graduate associate Louis Lu, and Dr. Catarina Madruga. As always, do not hesitate to contact us at admin@orderofm.com with ideas, responses, or pitches. And don’t forget to follow us on Twitter @OMultitudes.
All the best,
Ayesha Ramachandran