23 Oct 08

Dr Neil McLynn and Dr Arietta Papaconstantinou, two of the three members of the Humanities division who received a Mellon Sawyer Seminar award for ‘About Turns - Conversion in Late Antique Christianity, Islam, and Beyond.’

Two groups of academics from Oxford University have been funded $150,000 each for prestigious international Mellon Sawyer Seminars.

Awarded by the Mellon Foundation, these support comparative research on the historical and cultural sources of contemporary developments. This year 11 were awarded, including one each to a team from Oxford University Humanities and Social Sciences.

Dr Neil McLynn, University Lecturer in Late Roman History; Dr Arietta Papaconstantinou, Marie Curie Fellow at the Oriental Institute and Dr David Taylor University Lecturer in Aramaic and Syriac, received an award for seminars on ‘About Turns - Conversion in Late Antique Christianity, Islam, and Beyond.’

The successful bid from the Department of Economics was led by the newly launched Oxford Institute for Global Economic Development (OxIGED), headed up by Professor Sir Tony Atkinson. It is concerned with the making of national economic policy in the face of the challenges of globalization.

The Mellon Sawyer program aims to engage productive scholars in comparative inquiry that would, in ordinary university circumstances, be difficult to pursue. Each seminar will meet for one year and will run during the 2009-10 academic year. Sawyer Seminar awards provide support for one postdoctoral fellow to be recruited through a national (or international) competition, and for the dissertation research of two graduate students.

The Humanities team will focus on the two important movements of religious conversion that frame the late antique period: Christianity and Islam. Although these reorientations shaped the world as we know it, they have never been compared systematically, a gap this Seminar will now fill. Specialists of the two religions will explore questions such as state incentives to conversion, cultural resistance to conversion, the role of mediating figures like holy men, conversion and language change, or the economic aspects of conversion movements.

Interesting comparisons will be provided by conversions to Buddhism in East Asia at roughly the same period. The Seminar will involve members of several faculties across Humanities and Social Sciences, and bring to Oxford some of the world’s foremost authorities on this subject.

Dr McLynn said: 'The world's contemporary challenges need to be seen in historical perspective and social context. These seminars will ask 'Why do people convert; what is their motivation?’ By putting these questions in an historical setting, we can avoid much of the emotive colouring of current political debate to focus on answers which may have considerable relevance for current policy.’

The OxIGED Seminar is concerned with the theory and practice of economic policy-making. National economic policy is increasingly confronted by key global economic issues such as financial regulation, achieving the Millennium Development Goals, and tackling climate change. The Seminar will examine how different countries have approached the globalisation of economic policy-making. The Seminar will involve economists who are both leading academics and have been actively engaged in the formation of policy. It aims to bring together different fields of economics and will draw on other social sciences.

Tony Atkinson said: ‘Global economic developments are posing serious challenges to national economic policy-makers, but also to economics as a discipline; we hope that the Seminar will contribute to fundamental rethinking.'