The Radcliffe Institute seeks to support innovative basic research in the social sciences. The program in social sciences sustains an additional commitment to "public scholarship": the use of research to inform debates among citizens, advocates, and policy-makers. We hope to make the findings, concepts, and controversies of these fields available to and compelling for audiences beyond the high ivy walls of the university world. In seeking to bring the public back in, we recognize the importance of their support for social science research, a commitment to return the fruits of our labor to the commonwealth, and the contribution basic research makes to informed debate over the most pressing social issues of our time.

The Institute's social science program combines the interests and energy of Radcliffe fellows and Harvard's distinguished faculty in the social sciences to ask central questions, including the significance of immigration to American and western European economies, the emergence of new forms of representation in international governing bodies, the social psychology of prejudice, and a host of other issues of concern to anthropologists, economists, historians, political scientists, psychologists, and sociologists.

Research clusters at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study use the Radcliffe Fellowship Program to draw together scholars to focus on particular themes. A research cluster might have a longer life than a one-year fellowship, but it always includes a year when the scholars in the cluster are in residence at the Institute together. During the residential year, fellowship applicants with similar interests are encouraged to apply and to indicate the way in which their project will contribute to the topic.

Previous cluster groups have examined evolution of career and family trajectories among highly educated men and women, new logical foundations for theoretical linguistics, unconscious prejudice and the law, and the social and political impact of immigration on the US and Western Europe.

Questions regarding projects under way or future opportunities for social science research at the Institute should be directed to:
Executive Dean Louise Richardson, 617-495-8185

Lisa Anderson, dean of the School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University
Jean Comaroff, Bernard E. and Ellen C. Sunny Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology and of Social Sciences, University of Chicago
Susan Mayer, dean of the Harris School of Public Policy, University of Chicago
Robert Solow, Institute Professor of Economics Emeritus, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Scholar in Residence at the Russell Sage Foundation
Claude Steele, Lucy Stern Professor in the Social Sciences and former chair of the psychology department at Stanford University
Eric Wanner, president of the Russell Sage Foundation