The Harvard University Academy Scholars Program recognizes and supports excellent scholars at the start of their careers whose work merges disciplinary excellence in the social sciences or law with a command of the language and history or culture of countries or regions outside of the United States or Canada.
Their scholarship may inspire domestic, comparative, or transnational issues, past or present. The Harvard University Academy Scholars are a select community of individuals with resourcefulness, initiative, curiosity, and originality, whose work in cultures or regions outside of the US or Canada shows promise as a foundation for outstanding careers in major universities or international institutions.
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About the University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was established in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and among the most prestigious in the world.
The Massachusetts colonial legislature approved Harvard’s founding, “dreading to leave an illiterate ministry to the churches when our present ministers shall lie in the dust”; though never formally affiliated with any denomination, in its early years Harvard College primarily trained Congregational clergy.
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Its curriculum and student body were slowly secularized during the 18th century, and by the 19th century, it had appeared as the central cultural establishment among the Boston elite.
However, after the American Civil War, President Charles William Eliot’s long tenure (1869–1909) transformed the college and affiliated professional schools into a modern research university; Harvard University became a founding member of the Association of American Universities in 1900.