MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies


The Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale, commonly known as the MacMillan Center, is a research and educational center for international affairs and area studies at Yale University. It is named after Whitney MacMillan and his wife Betty.

Academics

As of 2026, the Macmillan Center offers degrees at both undergraduate and graduate levels. Undergraduate degrees include African Studies, East Asian Studies, Latin American Studies, Middle East Studies, and South Asian Studies. Graduate degrees offered at the center include African Studies, East Asian Studies, and European and Russian Studies.
Similarly, it is possible for graduating students to partake in a joint-degree program, where they can receive a master's and an equivalent professional degree from one of four partnered Yale professional schools, with those being the Law School, the School of Management, the School of Public Health, and the School of the Environment.
It is also possible for those to pursue a graduate certificate of concentration on African Studies, European and Russian Studies, Latin American & Iberian Studies, Material Histories of the Human Record, Middle East Studies, or Translation Studies in conjunction with graduate-degree programs at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences or the professional schools.

History

Yale has had deep interests in international and regional studies long before the MacMillan Center formally came into being. The World Wars awakened particular interests in the cultures, histories, economies, and languages of regions in Europe and Asia. During World War II, Yale faculty trained soldiers in languages, cultures, and regional affairs across Asia, Russia, and Europe. These academic programs laid the groundwork for Yale's first regional councils, many of which predate the MacMillan Center.
The MacMillan Center was created in the 1961s as the Concilium on International and Area Studies and later renamed in the 1980s as the Yale Center for International and Area Studies. A transformative gift from The Henry Luce Foundation allowed for the opening of Luce Hall in 1995, providing the Center with a unifying collaborative space for the first time. In April 2006, YCIAS was renamed as The Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale, honoring alumni generosity.

Regional Councils

The MacMillan Center hosts seven regional councils, covering the areas of Africa, East Asia, Europe, Latin America and Iberia, the Middle East, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. These councils offer a way to connect faculty across departments and disciplines who share common research interests, cultural knowledge, and a focus on specific geographic regions. Many of MacMillan’s councils also host undergraduate majors and MA programs, creating a direct academic connection to area studies for students at Yale.
As of 2026, the Center also has thirteen Regional Initiatives, which connect scholars and students through interdisciplinary programs focused on specific world regions and global themes. Together, they promote regional expertise, collaborative research, and engagement with pressing historical and contemporary issues.

Global Programs

The MacMillan Center hosts eighteen global programs, as of 2026. They promote scholarship and exchanges across a range of thematic areas, adopting interdisciplinary, transnational lenses to generate new insights on topics of global importance. Led by members of Yale’s faculty and drawing upon world-class scholarship from within and outside the university, the programs are designed to interrogate the causes of global challenges while advancing new forms of inquiry in the humanities, social sciences, and related fields.
See below for some of the MacMillan Center's largest and oldest global programs.

Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition

The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition was founded in November 1998 by David Brion Davis and funded by Richard Gilder and Lewis Lehrman, founders of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. Davis served as director till June 2004, when historian David. W. Blight, Sterling Professor of American History at Yale University, succeeded him as current director as of 2026.
The center's mission is to promote the study of all aspects of slavery and its legacy, with focus on the chattel slave system and its destruction. The center seeks to foster an improved understanding of the role of slavery, slave resistance, and abolition in the Western world by promoting interaction and exchange between scholars, teachers, and public historians through publications, educational outreach, and other programs and events. In addition, the center offers postdoctoral and faculty fellowships and summer graduate research fellowships and sponsors the Frederick Douglass Book prize, an award for most outstanding non-fiction book in English on the subject of slavery, resistance, and/or abolition for the year it is given.

Center for Historical Enquiry & the Social Sciences

The Center for Historical Enquiry & the Social Sciences provides insight on the interplay between history and the present, focusing on large-scale social transformations and solutions to difficult social crises and problems. The center serves as a bridge between the humanities and social sciences in order to "better understand the world we live in."

Center for the Study of Representative Institutions

The Yale Center for the Study of Representative Institutions serves as an interdisciplinary pilot program with the intention of developing the study of the theory and practice of representative government in the Anglo-American tradition. It is supported by the Thomas W. Smith fund and the Jack Miller Center's Commercial Republic Initiative, sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation.

Yale Research Initiative on Innovation & Scale (Y-RISE)

Y-RISE advances research on the effects of global development policy interventions at scale. While evaluation techniques for pilot-scale programs are well-developed, this program addresses the complexities that arise when scaling up interventions to create policy change.

The Fox International Fellowship

This is a graduate student exchange program between Yale University and 21 world-renowned academic partners in Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas. There are more than 800 alumni in the extensive Fox Fellowship network.
The mission of the Fox International Fellowship is to enhance mutual understanding between the peoples of the United States and other countries by promoting international scholarly exchanges and collaborations among the next generation of leaders. To accomplish this goal, the program seeks to identify and nurture those students who are interested in harnessing scholarly knowledge to respond to the world’s most pressing challenges.

Notable alumni

The following alumni received either a B.A., M.A. or a Ph.D. in international relations. It is to note that the degree has been phased out and replaced by the master's degree in global affairs in 2013, which is also now provided by the Jackson Institute.