The Andrew W Mellon Foundation of New York has awarded $107,000 (£75,000) to the Centre for Early Modern Studies at the University of Aberdeen, in support of one of their prestigious series of Sawyer Seminars. The seminar, entitled Citizens within Subjects, will be devoted to addressing the problems of political rights and participation faced by contemporary cultures from the perspective of early modern Europe.
The Sawyer Seminar program, named in honour of John E Sawyer, the Mellon Foundation's third President, provides opportunities within university settings for serious inquiry into the historical and cultural origins of significant contemporary developments.
The University of Aberdeen's award marks the first time that one of these prestigious Seminars has been awarded to a British university. Historically open only to America's leading research universities, invitations to apply for Sawyer Seminars were extended to select institutions in the United Kingdom for the first time last year. Of the 13 proposals selected in this extremely rigorous competition, only two were from British universities.
Commenting on this unprecedented trans-Atlantic link, the Director for Centre for Early Modern Studies Professor Howard Hotson, said: "The general objective of the Centre is to foster and co-ordinate international and interdisciplinary research on long-term, large-scale processes, shaping the European, British and North Atlantic worlds. Bridging the gaps between Britain, Europe and America is an important part of this agenda, and the Mellon grant provides the most attractive possible platform for launching this ambitious agenda at the very outset of the Centre's career."
The Early Modern Studies Centre will use the Mellon grant to host a series of conferences, workshops and fellowships during the academic year 2003-2004. Visit www.abdn.ac.uk/cems/sawer.hti for further details.
Phil Withington, a young historian who was one of the main architects of the Sawyer application, commented further on the objective of Aberdeen's Seminar: "Citizens within Subjects provides a fantastic opportunity to bring the recent and exciting work on citizenship in early modern Europe to the attention of a wider audience. Dealing with politics and participation beyond the level of monarchs, courts and nobility, the series offers one way of making professional historical scholarship once again relevant to contemporary issues and debates."