Graduate Fellows Program Expands with Mellon Grant
Graduate Fellows Program Expands with Mellon Grant
A new grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation will support the expansion of the Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellows Program, ISERP's oldest training initiative. The program's mission is to bring together talented dissertation-level students from across the social sciences and humanities to foster their ability to incorporate the methods, approaches, and knowledge of the different social sciences into their research.
When the program was established in 1999, there were few formal channels for discourse across Columbia's social sciences, and the training of scholars at Columbia was increasingly becoming entrenched in individual disciplines.
"We were concerned that disciplinary barriers could hinder developing knowledge," explains Peter Bearman, ISERP's Director. "Intellectual advancement often takes place at the intersection of two or more disciplines. This includes not only fields borrowing ideas, methods, and approaches from each other, but also offering new paradigms from which to understand traditional disciplinary puzzles. We also realized that isolated disciplinary training during the PhD phase was unlikely to develop the assets needed for collaborative interdisciplinary research at the faculty level."
Nearly a hundred students have participated in the program since its inception, representing the social sciences as well as Anthropology, Business, English, History, and the schools of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, Law, Public Health, and Social Work. The students present and critique each other's work at bi-weekly seminars, and share office space in ISERP's open-plan research suite. Program alumni have gone on to faculty and postdoctoral positions at top colleges and universities and have also taken positions in applied settings such as the RAND Corporation, SEEDCO, McKinsey & Company, and the International Monetary Fund, among others.
"What's extraordinary about this program is that it is genuinely interdisciplinary," reflects Tali Schaefer, a law student. "It is, in practice, a meeting of minds with different perspectives. In the program, I have engaged in rare conversation, and though I find myself struggling for words sometimes, it has focused my mind in unfamiliar and enriching ways. I am grateful for this experience."
The new Mellon award will create more opportunities for exchange between the social sciences and humanities. Starting in 2007-08, the program will accept more humanities students and will create short courses on basic and specialized tools and methods useful for graduate students and other scholars in the university community from both sets of disciplines. Potential topics include research methods; computer-based research tools; and research problems that cut across disciplines. Fellows will also benefit from the new availability of summer stipend support and increased fiscal support for their research. Reflecting on these new opportunities, Program Director William McAllister said, "We're very grateful to the Mellon Foundation for making it possible for us to make this program more accessible to humanities students and more useful in achieving the interdisciplinary research and education goals of ISERP."
