WELCOME
Dear MacMillan Center Alumni and Friends,
With a new academic year in full swing at Yale, I'm delighted to welcome you to the inaugural issue of the MacMillan Center Digest. I hope this newsletter helps you feel connected to MacMillan and curious about what is happening here now.
At MacMillan, we return again and again to a simple but challenging question: How do we understand a world that is constantly changing?
The answer is rarely found in one discipline, or from one perspective. It emerges through conversations across regions, languages, fields, generations, and experiences. That spirit of curiosity and connection is at the heart of MacMillan.
In this first issue, you'll meet some of the people who make that community what it is: alumni whose experiences at Yale continue to shape their work, students asking new questions about the world, and faculty pursuing research that crosses boundaries.
Enjoy reading and reconnecting wherever in the world this message finds you.
Warmly,
Sunil Amrith
Vice Provost for International Affairs
Henry R. Luce Director of the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale
Renu and Anand Dhawan Professor of History
Professor of the Environment
GET TO KNOW MACMILLAN LEADERSHIP
A Chat with Sunil Amrith
In conversation with MacMillan Center Director Sunil Amrith, we explore how the Center can bring regional expertise and global perspectives into conversation, and what it means to build an intellectual community capable of thinking across boundaries.
What was an inspiring moment in the development of your own area of specialization?
In my field of environmental history, new advances have come from recent collaborations between scholars in the humanities and the Earth sciences. Putting together sources that usually don’t belong together—ice cores and manuscripts, for example!—has allowed for breakthroughs in understanding past climate. We have a better understanding now of the social impact of extreme weather events as well as longer-term climatic shifts. This work also shows just how anomalous and unprecedented current patterns of warming are and so lends urgency to tackling climate change.
What is something you are proud of?
My students, both undergraduate and graduate. They are endlessly creative. My graduate students are pushing research forward in ways that I could never have anticipated; my undergraduates are taking what they learn at Yale into so many different fields of endeavor, many of them already making a positive impact in the world.
What are three words you would use to describe MacMillan?
Vibrant, polyglot, impactful.
What is something happening at MacMillan that you wish more people knew about?
The conversations that happen in our corridors and outside seminar rooms, where real learning happens and ideas are shared: the impact of such informal connections is huge, but much harder to capture than individual events!
INQUIRIES THAT FUEL EXPLORATION
What can local perspectives teach us about what peace really looks like?
In Mauritania, Yale anthropologist Catherine Panter-Brick and her collaborators are studying how different communities understand and experience “everyday peace.” Through visual mapping with students, community members, diplomats, and academics, the research reveals where perceptions of governance, security, economic opportunity, and social cohesion converge, and where they diverge. The project asks a deceptively simple question: What changes when the people most affected by conflict help define what peace means?
What can photography reveal about India’s most populous state?
Sacred rivers, collective devotion, and environmental strain come into focus in photographs of Uttar Pradesh. Yale scholars Swapna Sharma, Brian Wahl, and Anthony Acciavatti brought together experts across disciplines to explore the region’s contradictions—and how images can deepen our understanding of its cultural life and development challenges.
How do you recreate a song when the music has been lost for more than 400 years?
A collaboration between Yale and the University of São Paulo set out to reconstruct a Tupi-language song performed before the king of Portugal and Spain in 1619. The lyrics survived in a text describing the play in which it was performed, but the music did not. Scholars and musicians drew on historical research, musical expertise, and Tupi-language knowledge to develop a new musical setting and, ultimately, perform the song again.
THE NEXT GENERATION OF THOUGHT LEADERS
What can a ceramic vessel tell us about a nation?
For Ivana Ñique ’26, ceramics became a way to explore the relationship between material culture, politics, and national identity in Peru. Drawing on her studies in Latin American Studies and Political Science, Ivana created a collection of ceramic works inspired by pre-Columbian Andean forms, examining how the government of Juan Velasco Alvarado used Indigenous cultural heritage to shape Peru’s national identity.
What can medicine tell us about a culture?
In Ho Chi Minh City, Marissa Roundtree ’28 explored the cultural and historical significance of Vietnamese Traditional Medicine and its coexistence with modern medicine. Through interviews, field observations, and research into Vietnam’s distinct traditional practices, she examined how centuries-old forms of healing continue to evolve and play a role in everyday life.
Can you debate space colonization in Hindi?
At Yale, Hindi is becoming a language for engaging with global questions. The 2026 Yale Hindi Debate brought students from universities across the country together to debate topics ranging from happiness and mass tourism to whether investment in space colonization is a necessity or a luxury. The annual event shows how language learning can also create opportunities for leadership, community building, and exchange across universities.
A LEGACY OF RESILIENCE
“Kenny, this is Yale. Look around.”
When Ken Inadomi ’76 was 10 years old, his mother, Kimi Inadomi, brought him to New Haven and told him he might one day attend Yale. Decades later, that childhood visit has come full circle.
Kimi, who recently celebrated her 100th birthday, was incarcerated with her family during World War II at Arizona’s Poston War Relocation Center. She later earned a bachelor’s degree in history at age 46, and her resilience and commitment to education shaped Ken’s own life and work.
Ken has always been inspired by his mother’s journey, particularly her optimism throughout life. In her honor, Ken and his wife, Melinda Wolfe, recently established the Kimi Inadomi Fellowship at MacMillan’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. The fellowship will support research and public engagement around the theme of resilience. Understanding how history can inform the pursuit of a more just society, this fellowship will celebrate Kimi’s legacy by helping future generations.
The fellowship isn't only about remembering the past; it's about preparing future scholars and future leaders to understand how we build a more just society.
BE INSPIRED
Extraordinary voices are coming under MacMillan’s roof from the worlds of music, scholarship, and international affairs. Join us for conversations and experiences that connect Yale to the wider world.
Joel Mokyr '74 Ph.D. — George Herbert Walker Jr. Lecture
November 5, 2026
4:30 p.m. at Luce Hall Auditorium
Join Nobel Prize–winning economic historian Joel Mokyr for a conversation on technological innovation and the forces that have shaped economic transformation across societies.
Gustavo Dudamel at Yale
November 16–20, 2026
Experience a weeklong residency with acclaimed conductor and arts advocate Gustavo Dudamel, exploring the power of music, culture, and education to connect communities. The residency culminates with the presentation of the Henry E. Howland Memorial Prize and a performance with the Yale Philharmonia at Woolsey Hall
Charles Kupchan — Henry L. Stimson Lecture on World Affairs
December 3, 2026
12:00 p.m. at Luce Hall Auditorium
Hear scholar and former policymaker Charles Kupchan examine the changing international landscape and the challenges facing global governance and U.S. foreign policy.
IN OUR NEXT ISSUE...
Learn how MacMillan regional expertise has influenced research methodologies, advanced scientific thinking, and improved livelihoods.