THIS IS A JOINT SEMINAR WITH DIFFERENTIAL GEOMETRY & GEOMETRIC ANALYSIS and JOINT PRINCETON-RUTGERS GEOMETRIC PDEs.    I will discuss a gluing procedure designed to obtain canonical metrics on connected sums of Einstein four-manifolds. The main application is an existence result, using two well-known Einstein manifolds as building blocks: the Fubini-Study metric on CP^2, and the product metric on S^2 x S^2. Using these metrics in various gluing configurations, critical metrics are found on connected sums for a specific Riemannian functional, which depends on the global geometry of the factors. This is joint work with Matt Gursky.