Mellon Senior Forums at Branford College seek to foster in our Seniors the sense of belonging to the community of scholars. Organized in the form of dinner meetings to which both Seniors and their advisers are invited, they provide some of our most talented students the opportunity to present the results of their independent research projects. The Forums also offer the possibility of especially close interaction between the Master, the Dean, and Branford Seniors in comfortable and intimate surroundings. Branford holds a number of Senior Forums each term. After dinner is served, two students deliver research papers, usually fifteen minutes in length, to an audience of fellow Seniors. Attempts are made to cover a wide range of topics in various branches of the Humanities, the Social Sciences, and the Natural Sciences. Each paper is immediately followed by a lively and intense question and answer period which permits the Senior to clarify (and perhaps modify) his/her critical stance. For more information, please contact danilo.petranovich@yale.edu.
Coordinator for Mellon Forums at Branford College is Professor Danilo Petranovich. Joining him as co-conveners are Branford alums and Graduate Affiliates Caitlin Dean, '05, and Matt Andrews, '11.
Danilo Petranovich received his Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale University in 2007. He has taught at Yale as a Lecturer and at Duke as a Visiting Assistant Professor from 2008 to 2010. His research has focused on the history of American political thought, with a special focus on American national culture and Abraham Lincoln as a nation-builder. His two forthcoming articles are Lincoln's New Nationalism (Yale, 2011) and Lincoln's Biblical Oratory and the Coming of the Civil War (with Matthew Holbreich).
Some of his other research interests are reflected in the edited volume Identities, Allegiances, Affiliations (Cambridgte, 2007, with Seyla Benhabib and Ian Shapiro), and The Reagan I Knew (Basic, 2008, with William F. Buckley, Jr.).
