The Yan P. Lin Centre for the Study of Freedom and Global Orders in the Ancient and Modern Worlds brings together more than forty scholars from across the university working in comparative, historical, normative, and critical social inquiry. It provides a unified home for the humanistic social sciences, allowing for collaborations across the Faculties of Arts, Engineering, and Law, drawing on disciplines ranging from history, classics, architecture, political science, and philosophy. It is dedicated to studying social structures, social transformations, and ideas about social values from across eras and in regions around the world.
The Centre is clustered into five Research Groups:
- Global antiquities (coordinators Hans Beck and Griet Vankeerberghen)
- Transitions and global modernities (coordinators Anastassios Anastassiadis and Lorenz Luthi)
- Constitutional studies (coordinator Jacob T. Levy)
- Global justice (coordinator Catherine Lu)
- Democracy, space, and technology (coordinator Ipek Tureli).
The Centre's work is made possible by a generous gift to McGill from Yan P. Lin Ph.D. '92. The Centre is featured in McGill's Road to 200 initiative highlighting leading areas of research in the run-up to the University's 200th anniversary.
Many of its events can be seen online at the Centre's YouTube channel.
For upcoming event listings, please see here or click on the Events tab above.
For a list of previous events, please see here or click on the Past Events tab above.
2017-18 Annual Lecture
This year, the Yan P. Lin Centre Annual Lecture was given on March 29, 2018, by Timur Kuran, Professor of Economics and Political Science, and Gorter Family Professor of Islamic Studies, Duke University . The title of his lecture was “Clashes with and within Islam: Roles of Intolerant Communities”. His current projects include a study of the role that the Middle East’s traditional institutions played in its poor political performance, as measured by democratization and human liberties. Among his publications are Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification (Harvard University Press), Islam and Mammon: The Economic Predicaments of Islamism (Princeton University Press), and The Long Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East (Princeton University Press), all translated into multiple languages. He is also the editor of the tri-lingual, ten-volume compilation, Socio-Economic Life in Seventeenth-century Istanbul: Glimpses from Court Records (İş Bank Publications).