Dear friends,

Two co-sponsored conferences will close out Mershon's season next week: Tradition and Disruption in Latinx and Latin American Political Theory, and New Wave Realism V. Of course there will be summer happenings. The Transitioning from Violence Consortium hosts a webinar and a workshop in Northern Ireland, carrying forward its research on ritual and reintegration. Five faculty members and seven students are headed to Mokra Gora to participate in the Serious Games and World Politics Summer Seminar, a new step for the Serbian Educational Alliance. July sees the third iteration of the Carnegie-funded Quantum Bootcamp for Social Scientists. Funded students and faculty are flying out to conduct pandemic-delayed fieldwork.

The Mershon office, however, retreats from programming to planning mode, and you will hear from us less frequently. While you're still listening, we want to call your attention to one experiment in progress: some of our calls for proposals are moving up to an Autumn due date. Faculty Individual Research Grants, Programming Grants, and Residency Grants will now have a September 15th deadline for projects to begin in 2024-25. With the summer to generate proposals and earlier notification of Mershon awards, we hope that faculty can more successfully apply for FPL and external grants, and that longer lead time will make it easier to plan and schedule excellent programming. Look for these calls to be issued by the end of May. (Alger Scholarships, Graduate Research Grants, and New Associate Professor Grants will, however, retain a spring semester deadline.)

As a still new director, I'm profoundly grateful to the Mershon staff—Associate Director Teri Murphy, Business and Operations Manager Kyle McCray, Communications Specialist Andy Mackey, and Office Associate Dani Wollerman for the commitment and imagination they bring to Mershon's mission. Our postdocs, Sooyeon Kang, Brooks Marmon, Zaynab Quadri, and Sefa Secen have been able provocateurs of intellectual community, and our work-study students, Sydney Greene, Sunny Saini, Rachel Wright and Chi Mutiso, brought good humor to the office along with their labor. I'm also grateful to our affiliates and audiences for your good will in this back-in-person year of adjustments. I wish everyone a restful and fruitful summer.

Dorry