The Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale Announces Director’s Award Recipients

For Immediate Release

Contact: Marilyn Wilkes (203) 432-3413

marilyn.wilkes@yale.edu

The Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale Announces Director’s Award Recipients

May 1, 2007. New Haven, CT - The Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale has given its Director’s Award to Kishwar Rizvi, Assistant Professor, History of Art, and Jennifer Prah Ruger, Assistant Professor, Public Health, Global Health Division, Yale School of Medicine and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Law, Yale Law School. The MacMillan Center Director’s Award was established in 2005. The Awards are for nontenured Yale faculty who receive certain distinguished individual grants, prizes or fellowships for international research.

In addition to recognizing these junior faculty members’ accomplishments, the Director’s Awards are intended to enable them to enhance their future research. Recipients are appointed Research Fellows at the MacMillan Center and receive research funds of $5,000 per year for two years. Junior faculty members who have received one of the following awards are eligible:

Carnegie Scholar

Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship

Wenner-Gren Individual Research Grant

National Science Foundation Young Investigator Award

Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowship

Bradley Foundation Fellowship

Smith Richardson Junior Faculty Fellowship

Russell Sage Foundation Fellowship

Institute for Advanced Study Fellowship

Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences Fellowship

John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship

National Humanities Center Fellowship

Professor Rizvi was awarded the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Research Grant for her current research project, “Representing Kingship in Safavid Iran: Art and architectural culture during the reign of ‘Abbas I.” Through an interdisciplinary approach that utilizes the study of Persian historical chronicles, illustrated manuscripts and architecture, she intends to undertake an hitherto unprecedented study of the reign of Shah ‘Abbas (r. 1588-1629) through the cultural productions that defined his rule

“In Germany I will focus on a deluxe illustrated manuscript of the 1605 Shahnama (Book of Kings), which is currently at the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin, in addition to consulting collections in Vienna, London, Dublin and Paris,” said Professor Rizvi. “The MacMillan Center Director’s Award will help fund my research trip to Iran in order to carry out the architectural fieldwork that is the complement to the visual and textual analyses that I will undertake in Europe. I am very grateful for it.”

Professor Ruger holds a Career Development Award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and received the Labelle Lectureship in Health Services Research. Her research interests include health economics and ethics on the political economy of health, focusing on vulnerable and impoverished populations at the national and global level.

“It is a real honor to receive the MacMillan Center Director’s Award, said Professor Ruger. “It will be invaluable in furthering my research on the ethics and economics of health and healthcare disparities across the globe.”

Contact Information:

Marilyn Wilkes

The Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale

(203) 432-3413