School of Humanities gets Mellon Foundation grant for yearlong seminar on how war is represented

The UCI School of Humanities has received a $175,000 grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to produce “Documenting War,” a yearlong “Sawyer Seminar” that will explore 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 will begin in fall 2016 and be led by project co-directors Carol Burke, professor of English, and Cecile Whiting, Chancellor’s Professor of art history. UCI is one of 11 universities to receive prestigious Sawyer Seminar grants in 2015. “Under the leadership of Carol Burke and Cecile Whiting, our Sawyer Seminar will bring scholars together with journalists and military personnel for what we expect to be lively, bilateral conversations in which prejudices can be exposed and new resources for understanding conflict, narration and memory can be tested,” said Georges Van Den Abbeele, dean of the School of Humanities. The Mellon Foundation established Sawyer Seminar grants in 1994 to support comparative research on the historical and cultural sources of contemporary developments.