Directors' Dialogue with Sunil Amrith and Steven Wilkinson
Earlier this month, Sunil Amrith, the newly named Henry R. Luce Director of the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, and Steven Wilkinson, the former director of MacMillan and recently appointed dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences sat down together for a conversation about Amrith's work and his outlook on the future of MacMillan. Read the transcript below or click to watch the video above to learn more about Amrith's vision.
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Steven Wilkinson: I am, Stephen Wilkinson. I am the former director of the MacMillan Center, which I directed since 2019, and had a great five and a half years at the Center, which is Yale's, hub for international scholarship and research. A pan-university center, with links also all over the world. And I just stepped down at the end of February from that position. And it gives me very great pleasure, today to welcome my successor and friend, Sunil Amrith, who is the Renu and Anand Dhawan Professor of History. And now, I think since just a few days ago, both former chair of the South Asian Studies Council and director of the MacMillan Center. So, Sunil, welcome.
Sunil Amrith: Thank you, Steven.
Wilkinson: Yeah, I had a great time at MacMillan, and I'm curious -- you know MacMillan very well. You were attracted, in part because of MacMillan's existence, to coming to Yale. And I'm curious, what attracted you to this position?
Amrith: MacMillan has been such an important home for me since I came to Yale. And indeed, you're right. It was one of the attractions of this campus when I was, being recruited from a different institution. And I think just the sheer breadth of what MacMillan does, the energy that one feels every single time you're in Luce Hall, the sheer number of people that are coming through here all of the time, and the capacity to really be have a transformative impact on the world with the research that we support at the Center. All of those, I think, made this role, really a dream and a privilege to be able to step into.
Wilkinson: So, you're a you're a historian who, explores the intersection of human migration and global environmental history, with a focus on South and Southeast Asia. And you're the author of several big books, including, most recently, The Burning Earth: A History, which was named a New Yorker “Essential Book of 2024.” And I suppose I'm interested in how your mix of different area expertise as well as these particular issues map on to some of the things that you might like to do in MacMillan going forward.
Amrith: One of the reasons I feel so much at home at MacMillan is that I do have one foot firmly in regional studies, in my case both in South Asian and Southeast Asian studies. And then my work has, over the last decade or so, expanded into really global or even planetary questions of climate change, environmental transformation, migration. And I think one of my aspirations is to see how best we can continue to connect up those different parts of MacMillan's work, which is to say that MacMillan is impactful and influential in addressing global challenges, partly because it has that bedrock of regional expertise. I'd love to continue the work you've done, Steven, in trying to see how we can facilitate more conversation, both across our councils, but also then between our councils and our global programs. And that's very much in tune with the work that I myself have done and will continue to do, I think.
Wilkinson: One of the unusual things about MacMillan, by comparison with some similar centers at other universities, is that we exist as a provostial center to service all different parts of the University. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about, how you see our role within Yale as linking, different parts of the University and what is particular about MacMillan Center’s ability to do that compared with other kinds of centers at other universities.
Amrith: As you put it at the beginning of our conversation, Steven, it's Yale's international hub, which is to say that I think the MacMillan Center is able to act as a facilitator, as a catalyst, as a vehicle, for the international work that so many other parts of campus far beyond the social sciences and humanities want to do. And I think that while I was at the South Asian Studies Council, I think one of the most exciting new sets of connections that you helped us to build, Steven, was with the School of Public Health, and we have so many colleagues in the School of Public Health who do, extremely important work in South Asia. And it became clear to both sides, I think, how much there was to be gained in, in that partnership, that relationship. With the School of Architecture, too, I think I'm speaking now only about South Asia. But as soon as one widens out beyond that, I think that the possibilities for connections with the fine arts side of our campus, as well, are enormous.
Wilkinson: Yeah. For people who don't know how our, councils work and how they provide connections to people across the campus, would you just explain a little about how that works?
Amrith: The strength of our regional councils and those of the councils of African studies, of South Asian studies, of Latin American and Iberian studies, European studies, East Asian studies, Middle East studies. They're naturally interdisciplinary. And what brings the councils together is a shared interest in, those particular regions of the world and a commitment, I think, to understanding those regions on their own terms based on detailed local knowledge but also based on a lot of local partnership. And one can see then why that is a framework that can incorporate people from right across campus and with a shared interest in a particular region. I think we have the possibility to approach problems from unusually wide set of perspectives. And I think that's really the strength of the regional studies framework, particularly in MacMillan's context, where that is then put together with the global programs and the fact that we're a university-wide center.
Wilkinson: So, we've talked a bit so far about, MacMillan as a research institution. I wonder if you can say a little bit more about how we are as a teaching institution. And what we do in order to provide students with the resources that they need in order to have the kind of education and training that we really think is important for understanding the world.
Amrith: It's more important than ever that, Yale students, Yale College students, students at our professional schools, have a global perspective. And I think that MacMillan is really at the very core of infusing those global perspectives into the curriculum here at Yale. The center, of course, offers an extraordinary range of language instruction, a whole series of classes on particular regions, master's programs focused on particular regions. But I think our impact on the curriculum goes far beyond that. The sheer number of visitors we bring to campus, some of whom then end up visiting classrooms, the sheer number of events that we're able to hold, which we hope, attract a cross-section of our student body. I think that's really important to bringing the world to Yale and to everything we do here. The other thing that the Center does, which is crucial, and I certainly hope to continue the work that you've done to support this, Steven, is that we, provide the resources for students from Yale, both undergraduate students and graduate students, to spend their summers doing research, doing projects, doing internships in every corner of the world. And I think that's one of the greatest, assets that MacMillan has, is to be able to provide our students with that experience.
Wilkinson: Yeah. No, I, I completely agree. I know that when we were trying to attract students to come to Yale in the first place, the fact that MacMillan is here and that resources are available for language work, for research work, is just such an important part of their experience. I just met before this with a couple of my own graduate students, and both of them were attracted by the kind of language research support that we could give.
Amrith: And we shouldn't take it for granted. I mean, these are precisely the kinds of experiences that I think, in many universities are, diminishing. And I think that it's, a real treasure of Yale to be able to provide and continue to provide those experiences to our students.
Wilkinson: Yeah. And, you know, I think about MacMillan as a place that looks at the perennial questions in the arts and the social sciences and elsewhere, but also a place that can adapt quite nimbly to look at the challenges of the age. So maybe you talk a little bit about the way in which we can respond at MacMillan to what's going on now and what might be going on, in the near future, rather than, the, the mid to longer term.
Amrith: MacMillan is nimble, and the sheer number of affiliated faculty we have here means that we can quite quickly assemble, groups of people, of faculty, of students, of staff who can reflect quite in quite an agile way on the issues of the day and, if I think about MacMillan's programing already in the area of climate and sustainability, in the area of international security, increasingly I think MacMillan has a role to play in our campus conversations around AI. Because AI is transforming the world in ways that are quite distinctive and different parts of the world. And I think that MacMillan has the expertise, when it comes to linguistic inequality and AI, for example. MacMillan is very much, I think, well equipped to be able to start to weigh in on some of those questions. And what would an inclusive and an ethical AI look like when large language models have built into them a lot of linguistic equality?
Wilkinson: Well, I think I speak for everyone at MacMillan when I say we're we are truly delighted, to have really somebody who knows MacMillan from the inside who's one of our own, but has also been in many different institutions and has a world-wide scope in his own scholarship and intellectual background take over as director. So welcome, Sunil.
Amrith: Thank you, Steven, and thank you for your wonderful work leading the Center, which we've all benefited from.
To learn more about the MacMillan Center and its efforts, read its 2024 Impact Report.