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Yale has established a new interdisciplinary center focused on race, indigeneity and transnational migration, University President Peter Salovey and Provost Benjamin Polak announced Tuesday in a message to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
The center will support scholarship in ethnic studies and intersectional race, gender and sexuality research, as well as Native and diasporic communities. The email said the center will likely host the Ethnicity, Race and Migration Program and sponsor summer research fellowships for Yale undergraduate and graduate students. Salovey and Polak said further details will be released in the coming weeks, but noted that the establishment of the center furthers the University’s goal of becoming more inclusive.
“By supporting such scholarship, the center in part responds to our call for a more integrated, more open, and more inclusive university, one in which students, faculty, researchers, and others connect across academic units,” the email read.
Stephen Pitti, professor of American Studies and History and master of Ezra Stiles College, will serve as inaugural director of the center and chair of its implementation committee. Several other professors and staff members will serve on the committee as well.
Pitti said over the course of this semester, the implementation committee will be discussing the center’s first steps and reaching out to members of the Yale community for input. But the center has yet to find a physical space.
“We are looking to establish a permanent home for the center on campus in the next few years,” Pitti said. “There is strong support for finding a new space on central campus that will be home to this center, and I am confident that the University will identify and make such a space available in the coming semesters.”
Yale College Dean Jonathan Holloway sent an email to Yale College students Tuesday morning to share Salovey and Polak’s message to the FAS.