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For immediate release                                  Contact: Debbie Selinsky
Dec. 6, 1994                                           (919) 681-8055
                                                       SelinskyD@
                                                            mail01.adm.duke.edu


MELLON FOUNDATION AWARDS $350,000 GRANT TO
DUKE UNIVERSITY FOR INTERNATIONALIZATION PROJECTS


        DURHAM, N.C. -- The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded a
$350,000 grant to Duke University to support a three-year program
of interdisciplinary seminars exploring the historical and cultural
roots of significant contemporary developments in international
affairs.
        "The seminars will allow us to deepen the international
understanding of our faculty and students," said Duke President
Nannerl O. Keohane. "The program also will allow us to bring
members of the Duke community into ongoing interchange with
prominent international scholars interested in similar issues. 
Knowledge of the cultures, arts, histories and contemporary affairs
of peoples and nations throughout the world is central to the
experience of membership in the Duke University community." 
        Peter Lange, the university's first vice provost for academic
and international affairs, will act as principal investigator for
the program.  He said the Mellon grant will provide new
opportunities for Duke students and faculty as well as for
participating scholars from other U.S. and international
institutions. The seminars will help develop new, "more informative
conceptual frameworks and deeper substantive insights" in several
topical areas, he added. "The political events, social upheavals
and economic distress confronting numerous nations and peoples are
complex manifestations of significant, worldwide social, economic
and cultural change. The Mellon grant will stimulate active,
focused and sustained debates on these developments among Duke
faculty and students and visiting scholars of national and
international prominence."
        Duke seminars will focus on the following topics:
        * "Collective Actors in Transitional Societies" (Herbert
Kitschelt and James Leitzel, conveners)
        * "New Nationalism, New Identities, New Perspectives" (Edward
Tiryakian, convener, and John F. Richards, co-convener)
        * "Public Culture and Transnationalism" (Katherine Ewing,
convener)
        * "Think Globally, Act Locally: Women's Leadership and Grass
Roots Activism" (Nancy Hewitt, convener)
        According to Lange, "the year-long Mellon Seminars on
Contemporary Developments are grounded in disciplinary strengths
and linked to other institutional initiatives but will bring
together multiple disciplines to develop new contexts for inquiry
and understanding of significant issues."
        Each seminar will operate independently, led by its faculty
conveners and a steering committee, and each will have associated
post-doctoral and doctoral fellows and international faculty
participants, all supported by the Mellon Foundation's grant. 
Lange will serve as liaison with the faculty organizers, provide
oversight for the selection of post-doctoral and graduate fellows
and support the publication of a series of working papers emerging
from the seminars.
        The seminars will begin in the fall 1995 semester. The first
two will be chaired by professors Hewitt, Leitzel and Kitschelt.
The remaining two seminars, chaired respectively by Ewing and
Tiryakian and Richards, will take place in 1996-97 and 1997-98.
        Lange added that the Mellon Foundation's "long-standing
commitment to scholarship and inquiry into international affairs
has had a tremendous impact on the social sciences and humanities."
        "It is a great honor for Duke to be among the first
participants in this new seminars program; we look forward to the
discoveries the seminars will bring."
                               ###