Research Description
How people have thought about the planet has informed the institutions, norms, and policies that have pulled it together and torn it apart. For centuries, ideas of free trade, human rights or global governance have framed cooperation and competition, order and disorder. Such ideas have also spawned border-crossing movements, from campaigns to end slavery to commitments to reduce carbon emissions. In turn, global thinking and action have often reinforced commitments to national ideas and efforts to curb global exchange. The goal of this research theme is to explore how ideas framed the understanding of interests and the making of institutions that have yielded commonness and conflict across and within borders. We also want to understand how these ideas and practices came into being through scientific networks, foundations, and think tanks. In addition, we will examine rival world ideas that have challenged prevailing orthodoxies. The goal of the 2019-20 Fung Global Fellows cohort will be to explore the ways people learned to rely on or to reject strangers far away, as well as to imagine how global relationships came to be and could be different.
Faculty Director
Sandra Bermann
Cotsen Professor in the Humanities
Professor of Comparative Literature (2020-21).
Fung Global Fellows
Awol Kassim Allo
Senior lecturer
School of Law, Keele University
Thana Cristina de Campos
Assistant professor of ethics, law, and public policy
School of Government, Pontifical Catholic University of Chile
Jiazhi Fengjiang
Postdoctoral scholar
Jernej Habjan
Research fellow
Institute of Slovenian Literature and Literary Studies, Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts
Fabrice Langrognet
Adjunct lecturer of migration studies
Paris School of International Affairs, Sciences-Po
Mallika Leuzinger
Postdoctoral scholar