Letter from the Director | Summer 2007
Summer Break
ISERP and Columbia wrap up another fiscal year. On the financial front, ISERP is healthy. While we have been self-sufficient for a few years, we are now able to invest more heavily in a wide range of activities beyond our immediate doors. In this regard, ISERP will be making major contributions over the next few years to the large effort by a diverse group of interdisciplinary social scientists to build a population center at Columbia jointly housed between Arts and Sciences, the School of Social Work, and the Mailman School of Public Health. Likewise, ISERP will be making major contributions to the community of scholars associated with the Institute for Research on Women and Gender (IRWAG) as they take the next steps towards establishing an interdisciplinary center on race, class, and gender in global context. Finally, ISERP is in the early stages of developing a long-term collaboration with scholars at the Law School and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) for research on institutions, institutional reform, and inequality.
Most of these collaborations are structured as we have structured previous initiatives; ISERP provides seed money for faculty from diverse fields to work collaboratively on projects of mutual interest. For example, ISERP will devote additional seed money next year to projects related to population studies and to research on institutions and inequality. More information about these opportunities should be available at the start of the next semester.
ISERP continues to be very interested in working with and supporting scholars whose interests focus on global health, broadly construed. The joint Social Work-ISERP supported Global Health Research Center in Central Asia provides one locale for research opportunities related to such diverse issues as environmental health, HIV, IV drug use, migration, and the status of immigrants and women.
The first class of Mellon Interdisciplinary Fellows has been selected for 2007-08. The program precipitated an unusual flood of applications, more than double last year. Eighteen new fellows, nine from the humanities and nine from the social sciences, were selected. As part of the program, ISERP will be offering new short courses. In addition to bread and butter short courses on such topics as social networks, spatial analysis, and case selection, we also anticipate offering under the Mellon program new courses in topics such as photo-elicitation techniques and the analysis of narrative. Suggestions for short courses relevant for integrating the humanities and the social sciences are welcome.
Over the next year, we also expect to mount a remarkable number of short courses across our other programs, such as the RWJ Health & Society Scholars Program and the Quantitative Methods in the Social Sciences program. These courses, as always, are free for faculty, researchers, and graduate students across the University. They fill up quickly.
There have been some transitions. Leah Lubin, who was one of the first ISERP employees, has stepped down as Assistant Director. Earlier in her career at ISERP, Leah managed the QMSS program. One of her last major areas of responsibility was to help develop and organize the effort behind the ISERP-Oral History Office Oral History MA program that we anticipate initiating in the fall of 2008. This program, arising out of a series of collaborations between ISERP and the Oral History office, has now been approved by the GSAS and is awaiting senate approval before certification in Albany. We anticipate having roughly 10 students in the program during the first year. ISERP prospered with Leah as part of our community, and we will miss her greatly.
We would like ISERP to figure prominently in the debates and discussions related to the next presidential election. We are eager to support working groups and projects that focus on the upcoming election, help us understand the consequences of social policies, and help us track and make sense of the immediate domestic political context. Those with interests in these areas should let us know sometime over the summer so that we can help support and coordinate activities.
Peter Bearman, Director
Institute of Social and Economic
Research and Policy
