As mid-summer turns to late summer at the Weatherhead Center, our pulse begins to quicken. U.S.-Japan Research Associates complete their summer schooling, now prepared for the academic year. Fellows-to-be come by for informal introductions. Faculty and students re-emerge from many corners of the world from their research travels. A few freshly-minted PhDs with the good fortune of holding current postdoctoral fellowships wear well-earned relief on their faces (at least until they begin in earnest to test the job market). Only our staff is relatively unchanged: they work year-round to maintain our vitality in every season.

Research, of course, is our lifeblood. Free inquiry within the realms of international, transnational, global, and comparative themes, mostly in the disciplines of anthropology, economics, government, history, and sociology—but touching upon and being informed by the work of all of Harvard’s professional schools—animates everything we do. We are constructed upon the assumption that scholars young and old, from a wide variety of disciplines, must work together to discover complex truths—and that an institution well endowed and well run must provide the necessary glue.

And that the provision of this glue must be through conscious acts of consistent engagement…

The Center is sponsoring 38 seminars this year—the most in recent memory and, very likely, the most ever. One might think that such an expansion in times of recession is at the very least surprising or, perhaps, unwise. We are, however, consciously picking up slack that exists in other places around the University and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, doing our best to provide resources where they have dried up elsewhere, and fanning initiatives that we think will stimulate thinking and promote further intellectual growth. To this end, Niall Ferguson’s and James Esdaile’s Seminar on Ethics, Economics, and International Relations and Orlando Patterson’s Workshop on Culture, History, and Society join the still relative newcomer seminars on Religion and Politics, on Turkey in the Modern World, on Nigeria in the World, on the Sustainability of the World's Food and Farming Systems, and a wide array of offerings of very long standing. Needless to say, there is no lack of traffic in our halls during the typical term-time weekday afternoon.

Further to the theme of expansiveness, this year we have awarded 29 grants to Harvard graduate students to support their pre-dissertation and mid-dissertation research, along with grants for language study, for a cumulative amount $96,054. This is in addition to our awarding of 5 ½ dissertation-completion grants, each valuing some $29,000. The reasons for this largesse? With Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences still in deficit, we must meet the challenge not only to cover FAS financial obligations but also to volunteer additional funds to students whose research-funding needs, though not technically entitled, are no less real or compelling. How, after all, can one complete an outstanding dissertation without beforehand having found the wherewithal to spend significant time in the field or in language study?

Perhaps most dramatically expansive in 2011–2012 are two funding initiatives provided to close working groups of faculty. A Weatherhead Initiative grant, along the lines of funding that we have traditionally maintained for over ten years, has just begun in July 2011, led by a research team comprised of principal investigators Professors Michael B. McElroy of the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and Dale W. Jorgenson of the Department of Economics; Harvard-based researchers Chris P. Nielsen, Mun S. Ho, and Zhao Yu; and Tsinghua University-based and Chinese Academy for Environmental Planning-based colleagues. Their project, “The Costs and Benefits of Carbon and Air Pollution Control in China: An Interdisciplinary and Analytical Framework,” investigates the effects of two kinds of emission control policies—carbon taxes, and anticipated technology mandates for control of nitrogen oxides—with the ultimate goal of influencing Chinese public-policy decisions on this very serious and growing problem. Astride that project is the start of the first Weatherhead Initiative “Research Cluster.” Toward an exploration of “Global History,” historians Sven Beckert and Charles Maier are beginning a multi-year project to mobilize scholars from around the world, providing funding for graduate students, undergraduates, and post-doctoral researchers, strengthening teaching on global history, and cooperating with sister institutions on other continents to ignite, in Sven Beckert’s words, “the search to understand how human societies have developed as an interactive community across the world... examining processes, networks, identities and events that cross the boundaries of modern nation states.” We are excited about this new model for scholarly interaction, and we look forward to our development of more “clusters” in the future.

This year we have 174 Faculty Associates, a majority of whom hail from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, but a growing number whose primary appointments are in Harvard’s professional schools. These faculty participate in the life of the Center by initiating and chairing our public and private events, serving on our various selection committees, and, most importantly, seeking the grants available to them from the Center to advance their research agendas.

We are particularly pleased to include in our scholarly community in 2011–2012 the inaugural group of five Prize Fellows in Economics, History, and Politics. This new initiative, led by Emma Rothschild, encourages outstanding scholarship from across the disciplines that is animated by a desire to understand economic change. The fellowship is closely associated with the Joint Center for History and Economics, based at Harvard and at Magdalene College and King's College, University of Cambridge. We are very proud to have the opportunity to work with and learn from these extraordinary young scholars.

The Center is also excited to greet a few visiting faculty members for the year. James R. Dunn will be our 2011–2012 William Lyon Mackenzie King Visiting Professor of Canadian Studies. His appointment at the Harvard School of Public Health enables him to lead our Canada Program and to teach one course each semester. An associate professor in the Department of Health, Aging and Society at McMaster University, Jim is interested, broadly, in public health as it relates to societal inequalities, particularly in the realm of housing and neighborhood settlement patterns. Joining him in the Canada Program is Daniyal Zuberi, our Mackenzie King Visiting Research Fellow, who is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of British Columbia and works on matters of urban poverty and social welfare. Finally, our Program on Transatlantic Relations and its director, Karl Kaiser, have managed to entice long-time friend Jacques Mistral, professor of economics and head of economic studies at the French Institute of International Relations and a member of the Conseil d’Analyse Economique, to join us as our spring-term Pierre Keller Visiting Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School.

This year we welcome Erez Manela to lead our Program on Global Society and Security (PGSS), the newest iteration of what for many years was the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies and in recent years operated as the National Security Studies Program (under the constant leadership of Stephen Peter Rosen). Seven graduate fellows are gathering in a frequently-meeting seminar that we expect will be a springboard for future program developments on a theme of crucial importance, security, both within the Center’s long heritage and, of course, for the world.

Finally, we have the prospects of short-term visitors as guest lecturers. This fall we co-sponsor with the Harvard Divinity School Nigeria’s Sultan of Sokoto, Alhaji Muhammad Saád Abubakar, to deliver a Samuel L. and Elizabeth Jodidi Lecture “for the promotion of tolerance, understanding and good will among nations, and the peace of the world.” And we expect Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper to be our Warren and Anita Manshel Lecturer on American Foreign Policy, taking up a joint invitation from the Weatherhead Center and the Harvard Kennedy School.

Welcome back—or welcome for the first time—to Harvard and the Weatherhead Center. I offer best wishes to all for a productive year.

Beth A. Simmons
Center Director