The Weatherhead Center continues its tradition in 2009-2010 of supporting long-term and cutting-edge research in international affairs. One of our essential purposes is to bring together scholars who may hold consonant goals but would not ordinarily collaborate, were it not for the Center’s presence. The Center retains its capacity, even in these relatively lean times, to convene scholars from a variety of disciplines and practitioners of great reputation to help each other understand the current dynamics and historical roots of the world’s most interesting intellectual puzzles.

This Center takes its convening power seriously. We play an integrating role not only within Harvard University but also as we reach out to sister institutions both near and far. The seminars that we have newly developed for 2009-2010 bear witness to this fact. “The Ecologies of Human Flourishing,” an initiative of Donald Swearer, director of the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School, brings together thinkers on the economic, sociological, religious, ethical, environmental, historical, and literary dimensions of the constructs of notions of human flourishing, the quality of life, and the common good in the contemporary world. Both the Weatherhead Center and the Harvard Center for the Environment are collaborating with Professor Swearer on this series. Ashutosh Varshney, once a Faculty Associate of this Center now teaching at Brown University, is working with Patrick Heller of Brown University, Prerna Singh, a faculty member new to Harvard’s Department of Government and the Weatherhead Center, and Vipin Narang, a Graduate Student Associate of the Center soon to be at MIT, to establish a Joint Seminar on South Asian Politics that endeavors to answer a series of “‘big’ questions of politics, economics, and security, on which the South Asian region in general, and India in particular, offer engaging or pressing perspectives.” Finally, Rob Paarlberg of Wellesley College, no stranger to the Center with over two decades of intellectual participation, is initiating a faculty workshop entitled “Debating a Sustainable Food System.” With John Briscoe, a new faculty member of Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and the School of Public Health, and Missy Holbrook, from the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Professor Paarlberg convenes this working group to assess the biological, environmental, social-justice, human-health, commercial, and political questions of food with scholars and practitioners both within the Harvard community and outside it.

The Center’s core responsibility, of course, is to support the research efforts of Harvard faculty. The annual award of a Weatherhead Initiative grant is the most prominent way for the Center to recognize great ideas that have great promise. In 2009-2010, a research team of Emmanuel Akyeampong (Department of History), Robert Bates (Department of Government), Nathan Nunn (Department of Economics), and James Robinson (Department of Government) is launching “Understanding African Poverty over the Longue Durée.” Seeking to discover why Africa’s economic performance in the 50 years since independence has been so poor, the team aspires to engage those answers as a fulcrum to understanding the continent’s past and future. We expect that their insights will be both thought-provoking and useful, and that their groundbreaking collaboration will be a worthy successor to the eight previous Initiatives supported by the generosity of the Weatherhead Foundation.

One of the most important kinds of support the Center can offer our heavily committed Faculty Associates is simply time to carry out research. This year, we are happy to support junior-faculty synergy research leaves—research projects that incorporate the design of a new research seminar for the teaching of undergraduates upon the professors’ return—for three junior faculty. Muhammet Bas (Department of Government) is researching decision making in the presence of unexpected shocks. Nahomi Ichino (Department of Government) is conducting field experiments in Ghana on electoral misconduct. Filiz Garip (Department of Sociology) examines contemporary Mexican-U.S. migration flows. Sociologists Jason Beckfield and Jocelyn Viterna, political scientist Jens Meierhenrich, and economist Erica Field are also beneficiaries of Center funding for their leaves as part of the Center’s support of Faculty of Arts and Sciences imperatives.

The Weatherhead Center is once again offering competitive grants designed to enable WCFIA Faculty Associates to seek large-scale extramural research support. Three Incubation awards of $30,000 provide time, space, and travel reimbursements to individuals or teams to construct a strategy to secure major funding from foundations or government sources. The Center recognizes that facilitating our faculty’s ability to find outside funds is particularly important in these times and, further, that the startup costs associated with making credible applications to outside sponsors are high. As a Faculty Associate myself, I have recently carried out my own research incubation activities toward seeking major funding for “Cooperative Exchanges in Confronting Transnational Crime.”

The Center proudly hosts over two dozen Graduate Student Associates in residence each year. In 2009-2010 we welcome a particularly able and experienced GSA class whose constitution is more truly interdisciplinary than ever before. After offering many years of inspiration and mentoring to our graduate students, Steve Levitsky of the Department of Government is stepping down as our director of graduate student programs, and historian Erez Manela is assuming this important position of leadership. Both Professor Levitsky and Professor Manela have recently accepted offers of tenure from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. We embrace their service to the Center, past, present, and future, with high expectations for the many roles they will undoubtedly play here over many years.

The Center continues to contribute widely and deeply to Harvard undergraduates’ scholarly experience of the world. Through the generous support of a number of donors—the Williams/Lodge International Government and Public Affairs Research fund, Hartley Rogers, the Samuels Family, Adele Simmons, and the Weatherhead Foundation—the Center has sponsored undergraduate field research for 23 Harvard College students in 2009 to analyze social-science questions relating to Australia, Belgium, Canada, China, France, Japan, Jordan, Kenya, Malawi, Mexico, Morocco, Nepal, Peru, Sierra Leone, Spain, Switzerland, Syria, Uganda, and the United Kingdom. Their topics vary widely, from the impacts of the truth and reconciliation commissions to race and urban violence; and from social protests and social movements in multiple regions to the classic questions of international relations between nation states. We enthusiastically welcome historian Ian Miller to the directorship of our undergraduate student programs.

As a multi-layered community of scholars, the Weatherhead Center quite consciously designs various activities to reinforce cooperation among researchers at very different stages in their careers. Partnerships between faculty and undergraduates continue to flourish as a result of the Center’s undergraduate research assistants program, which screens, trains, matches, and subsidizes undergraduate students to assist faculty and Harvard Academy Scholars in their research. Reflecting the great value we place on these partnerships, the Center favors proposals that are intrinsically meritorious and foster intellectually rewarding cooperation between our Faculty Associates and affiliated students.

The Center has long encouraged the support of our Fellows through the direct and committed intellectual sponsorship of individual Faculty Associates. We are particularly fortunate this year that Iain Johnston (Department of Government) has brought to us Yao Yunzhu, a senior colonel in the Chinese People’s Liberation Army who has broad experience and research interests in East Asian security matters. Historian Walter Johnson introduced to us Seán Flannery, who has come to the Center from the investment industry to study the impact of deregulation on global financial markets and to relate closely with members of Professor Johnson’s Project on Justice, Welfare and Economics. Anthropologist Mary-Jo Good is working with Aguswandi, an Indonesian human rights activist interested in strengthening democracy in the Muslim world. The Fellows Program offers a unique opportunity to further our long-esteemed vision of scholar-practitioner partnerships. We are pleased to have been able to affirm these relationships this year.

Changes in information technology and the University’s financial health present the Center with a responsibility to reconfigure the manner in which we disseminate our research. We have resolved to eliminate—yes, with a sigh—our traditional print publications such as the Year Ahead, Centerpiece, and various promotional brochures that for years have announced our grant competitions. We have supplanted these with a more robust utilization of our Web site. In recent years this change was presaged by our dispensing with the hard copy version of the Center’s Working Paper Series and replacing it with an online collection. We continue to invite all Center affiliates to submit papers to our Working Paper Series as we carry out a concurrent process of harvesting the research papers of Center Faculty Associates.

In 2009–2010, the Weatherhead Center operates under a recently reformed governing structure, with an Executive Committee reconstituted with some 15 faculty serving three-year terms of service and a panel of Senior Advisers, whose engagement is invaluable. A Steering Committee of faculty associates from across the disciplines and Schools provides peer review for faculty grants and is actively involved in getting our resource allocations right.

There is no question that in this difficult financial environment the Center will continue to make a number of necessary adjustments. This involves new ways of thinking about our needs and programs. The Center has a most talented, flexible, and efficient staff that has shown its willingness and ability to adjust, even as their numbers are diminished by voluntary departures, mostly—it pleases me to say—for career-enhancing opportunities elsewhere.

As I am on sabbatical during the 2009-2010 academic year, I am happy to announce that Professors Jeffry Frieden (fall 2009) and James Robinson (spring 2010) are serving as acting Center directors in my absence. I am very grateful to them, and I am confident that they will provide inspired leadership to the Center.

In the context of our current challenges, I appreciate now more than ever the cooperation and contributions of colleagues, students, and staff who help us to make the decisions, both wise and just, that these times and our distinguished legacy most certainly require.

Beth A. Simmons
Center Director