The Centre for Digital Humanities and Multilateralism welcomed Yi-Tang Lin, Pierre-Yves Saunier, and Ludovic Tournès for a seminar on Nov 15th, 2024. The series of Friday seminars provide a collaborative forum to engage with researchers exploring the digitalization of data and resources. You can find the abstract of this talk and further information about the speakers below:
During the 20th century, numerous US philanthropic foundations played a crucial role in supporting and establishing governmental agencies, hospitals, research institutions, and universities across dozens of countries and colonial territories. The Graduate Institute was among these beneficiaries. These foundations also funded individual awards for research and training abroad. Jacques Freymond, former professor and director of the Institute, was one of the thousands of individuals who received such awards. This project focuses on these mobility awards between 1914 and 1971, tracing individual trajectories and examining the role of the organisations that served as both home and host institutions for these individuals.
Yi-Tang Lin is an SNSF-PRIMA Professor in the Department of History at the University of Zurich. Her research is at the crossroads of international political history and the history of science, technology, and medicine. Currently, she is working on rice planting technology exchanges between Pacific Asia and West Africa against the backdrops of Decolonization and the Cold War.
Pierre-Yves Saunier is a historian at CNRS in France (Laboratoire Triangle, Ècole Normale Supérieure de Lyon), and an associate professor at Université Laval (Québec City). In addition to the history of US philanthropic foundations, he is interested in the history of cities in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Ludovic Tournès is professor of global history at the university of Geneva. A specialist of cultural and scientific transnational circulations, he has published numerous books and articles among which L’Argent de l’influence Les fondations américaines et leurs réseaux européens (Autrement, 2010) ; Global Exchanges : Scholarships and Transnational Circulations in the Contemporary World (19-21st centuries) (Berghahn Books, 2017) ; Américanisation. Une histoire mondiale (XVIIIe-XXIe siècles), Paris, Fayard, 2020 ; and Phillanthropic Foundations at the League of Nations : An Americanized League ? Routledge, 2022). He is one of the coordinators of the SNSF funded collective research project entitled « Rockefeller fellows as heralds of globalization : the circulation of knowledge, elites and practices of modernization (1920s-1970s).