MacMillan Center awarded U.S. Department of Education funding

The Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies has been awarded almost $5.6 million in funding from the National Resource Centers (NRC) program and the Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships (FLAS) program, both administered by the U.S. Department of Education.

The funds will be used over the course of the next four years. In the 2014-2015 academic term — the first year of the grants — the NLC and FLAS will provide $1.4 million for international affairs teaching and programming, as well as for student fellowships for the academic year, and summer study of languages and related courses. 

The Council on African Studies and the Council on Middle East Studies each received a NRC grant, which will support a variety of programs, initiatives, and outreach. Both of these councils, as well as the Council on European Studies, also received FLAS Fellowships funding for studying language and related world regional courses.

“With so much focus on Africa and the Middle East in the world today, it is important to strengthen international and world region teaching programs and the teaching of languages, and this funding will enable us to do that here at Yale,” said Ian Shapiro, the Henry R. Luce Director of the MacMillan Center, and Sterling Professor of Political Science. “The European grant will also enable us to support Russian and related East European language study, as well as others among the 14 European languages currently taught for credit at Yale.”

The NRC program provides grants to establish, strengthen, and operate language and area or international studies centers that will be national resources for teaching any modern foreign language.

The FLAS Fellowships program provides world language instruction in combination with area studies, international studies, or the international aspects of professional studies.