Prof. of Cinema and Digital Media, Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli, and Anupam Chander (UC Davis School of Law), were awarded a 2014 Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar for their year-long seminar, “Surveillance and Democracy,” offered during 2015–2016.

Please click on the “Mellon-Sawyer Surveillance and Democracy Seminar” link for more information on upcoming speakers and events. 

About the Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminars:

The Mellon Foundation’s Sawyer Seminars were established in 1994 to provide support for comparative research on the historical and cultural sources of contemporary developments.  The seminars, named in honor of the Foundation’s long-serving third president, John E. Sawyer, have brought together faculty, foreign visitors, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students from a variety of fields mainly, but not exclusively, in the humanities and social sciences, for intensive study of subjects chosen by the participants.  Foundation support aims to engage productive scholars in comparative inquiry that would (in ordinary university circumstances) be difficult to pursue, while at the same time avoiding the institutionalization of such work in new centers, departments, or programs.  Sawyer Seminars are, in effect, temporary research centers.