Mellon Sawyer Seminars

Black Reconstruction as a Portal was the year-long seminar at UCI that explored the global salience of visions of Black Reconstruction as a portal between the crisis that marks our current predicament and the freedom dreams of those who have taken to the streets, insisting that another world is still possible. Through a faculty/graduate student reading group, this seminar explored W.E.B. Du Bois’s historical study, Black Reconstruction, as a conduit to our present global crisis. The seminar was led by Damien Sojoyner, Professor of Anthropology, and Yousuf Al-Bulushi, Assistant Professor of Global & International Studies.

Suffer Well was a year-long seminar organized by the UCI Center for Medical Humanities to bring together scholars, artists, and medical practitioners to explore human suffering as both the limit of communication and expression and the event horizon from which new forms of sociality and social formation may be made possible.  Suffer Well created a dialogue around how different disciplines attend to and develop modes of understanding suffering and react to experiences of suffering.

Documenting War was a temporary research center for cross-disciplinary, intensive study of how war is represented. Funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the year-long Sawyer Seminar explored the genres, rhetoric, and real effects of wartime documentation and postwar reflection, as carried out by journalists, soldiers, civilians, and artists in verbal, visual, and mixed media forms. The seminar was led by project co-directors Carol Burke, Professor of English, and Cécile Whiting, Professor of Art History and Visual Studies.