Yale University. Institute of International Studies

Yale's prominence in international and area studies has its roots in the earliest days of the University, with early missionaries trained at Yale who worked in Asia and around the world. Yale had one of the first faculty chairs in a non-western language, Sanskrit, the root language of much of contemporary South Asia. The seeds of a proud Latin Americanist tradition were planted in the early 1900s, with the appointment of Hiram Bingham in 1906 as a professor of History and Archaeology who subsequently brought Machu Picchu and Incan civilization to Western attention. At the very beginning of the twentieth century, Yale awarded one of the first U.S. Ph.D.s to an Asian-born scholar, Ken-ichi Asakawa, who later became a distinguished professor of Japanese History and Languages at Yale, retiring in 1942. There was an institutional presence for world area studies at Yale as early as the 1930s. Paralleling area studies, Yale's scholarly strength in international relations grew in the interwar years with the then highly-innovative and interdisciplinary Institute for International Relations. This Institute, supported by the Rockefeller Foundation as well as corporate and alumni sponsors, established the first interdisciplinary Ph.D. program at Yale

During World War II, these parallel academic streams were combined into a formidable set of training programs, geared largely to the needs of the U.S. military in the languages, culture, history and economics of different parts of the world. After the war, these programs grew into a variety of freestanding interdisciplinary faculty councils with notable strengths in East Asia, Southeast Asia and Russia and Eastern Europe. These interdisciplinary councils were tied loosely to the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences with resources overseen by the Provost. Area studies and international relations efforts at Yale enjoyed support from major foundations, notably the Ford Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation. Faculty with interests in Africa formed a council in 1958. With the passage of the National Defense Education Act in 1958, these language and area studies programs also received additional support from the federal government.

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