A member of the Weatherhead Center Executive Committee, William Kirby, the Geisinger Professor of History and director of Harvard’s Asia Center, will be the next dean of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, beginning July 1. Harvard University President Larry Summers, in announcing the decision on May 20, called Kirby “a greatly admired member of the Faculty — thoughtful, experienced, creative, and wise. I am confident that he will be a strong and distinguished leader of the FAS and a worthy successor to Jeremy Knowles, who has served with such distinction for the past eleven years.”

The Program on International Conflict Analysis and Resolution (PICAR) recently received generous support from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation for one additional year of operation. In its final year the program will consolidate its work over the past decade, bringing some projects to a close and establishing new organizational frameworks for the continuation of others. The latter effort will be greatly facilitated by its history of close and fruitful collaboration with partner institutions at Harvard, the academic community of greater Boston and around the United States, and with colleagues in various parts of the world. PICAR, under the direction of Herbert C. Kelman, Richard Clarke Cabot Research Professor of Social Ethics, will focus on five projects in 2002- 03: Israeli-Palestinian peacebuilding; providing technical assistance to the government of Sri Lanka in the development of the peace process with the Tamil Tigers; analyzing the role of the media in the escalation and resolution of the Middle East conflict; conceptualizing the development of an international facilitating service for interactive conflict resolution; and creating an historical record of its work in conflict resolution. The Weatherhead Center warmly welcomes the continued presence of PICAR in this community.

In April the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation renewed its generous core support to the Weatherhead Center’s Program on Nonviolent Sanctions and Cultural Survival (PONSACS). The funds will allow PONSACS, under the direction of David Maybury-Lewis, Edward C. Henderson Professor of Anthropology, to continue its conflict analysis, management, and related research program in Latin America, while maintaining its Harvard-based research and seminars. Hewlett Foundation support will also permit the publication of research results and the preparation of case-based study guides and other tools to assist in the training and education of those involved in or concerned with natural resource-based conflicts, particularly those that involve indigenous peoples and the State.

Anne-Marie Slaughter, J. Sinclair Armstrong Professor of International, Foreign, and Comparative Law and a member of the Weatherhead Center Executive Committee, and Elizabeth J. Perry, Henry Rosovsky Professor of Government and Weatherhead Center faculty associate, have recently been elected as fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS). The AAAS, founded in 1780, cultivates “every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honor, dignity, and happiness of a free, independent, and virtuous people.” Slaughter will be leaving Harvard shortly as she has recently been named dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University effective September 1, 2002.

The new chairman of Harvard’s Committee on African Studies is Weatherhead Center faculty associate and Hugh K. Foster Associate Professor of African Studies, Emmanuel Akyeampong of the Department of History. Professor Akyeampong has recently been on research leave in Ghana. He will replace Professor Kwame Anthony Appiah, who will be moving to Princeton University this summer.

The 2002-03 Sidney R. Knafel Dissertation Completion Fellow is Irene Bloemraad, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology. Her project is entitled “The Political Incorporation of Immigrants in the United States and Canada: Institutional Con-figurations, Naturalization and Political Participation.” The grant is named for Sidney R. Knafel, the chairman of the Center’s Visiting Committee from 1991 to 2000.

Maurice Copithorne (Fellow 1974-75) was conferred with the Doctor of Laws, honoris causa, by the University of British Columbia on May 23, 2002.