Topic: Networks/Mobilities: Cornell Society for the Humanities Fellowships
CORNELL SOCIETY FOR THE HUMANITIES FELLOWSHIPS 2009-2010
Timothy Murray, Director of the Society for the Humanities, is pleased to announce the 2009-2010 research focal theme: "Networks/Mobilities." Six to eight Fellows will be appointed.
Selected Fellows will collaborate with two Senior Scholars in Residence:
Fall 2009
Keller Easterling,
Associate Professor of Architecture, Yale University. Easterling is the author of Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and Its Political Masquerades (MIT, 2005); Organization Space: Landscapes, Highways and Houses in America (MIT, 2001); a laser disk history of suburbia, Call it Home (with Richard Prelinger; Voyager, 1991); American Town Plans (Princeton Architectural Press, 1993), a web installation, Wildcards: A Game of Orgman and a forthcoming book on global infrastructures, Extrastatecraft.
Spring 2010
Brian Massumi,
Professor of Communications, University of Montreal. Massumi is the author of Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Duke University Press, 2002); A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari (MIT Press, 1992); First and Last Emperors: The Absolute State and the Body of the Despot (with Kenneth Dean; Autonomedia, 1993); and editor of A Shock to Thought: Expression After Deleuze and Guattari (Routledge, 2002) and The Politics of Everyday Fear (University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
Call for Fellowship Applications
The Society for the Humanities invites scholars to reflect upon the theme of "Networks/Mobilities" in order to further understanding of historical and contemporary flows of peoples, materials, images, and ideas across physical and virtual boundaries. Relations of mobility and immobility, insofar as they are being reconfigured by broad-ranging new technologies of surveillance, detention, and legal/administrative regulation, are also germane to the theme. The Society encourages applicants to investigate the cultural, social, philosophical, and methodological implications of the theme.
In addition to raising wide-ranging historical inquiries and broad conceptual and epistemological issues, applicants might ask whether the commonplace tropes of diaspora, hybridity, and migration suffice for understanding contemporary globalization and shifting patterns of social and cultural influences through travel, trade, and migration of peoples, goods, and ideas--overland and across water and air. While the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean, and the South Pacific have been focal sites for analysis of movements over several centuries, critical practices and enhanced communications provide additional networks of diverse and activated mobilities, from an emergent understanding of Islamic civilization to a broader recognition of comparative Latin American and Asian cultures and their relation to the West.
Of equal interest is the role of digital culture in relation to migrations, networking, and global cosmopolitanisms. Just as ancient and early modern technologies of writing have been compounded by modernist technologies of vision and sound, from the phonograph to the cinema, recent online networks have extended the range of cultural mobilities, and with them the cast and reach of experience. To what extent might these new mobilities constitute emergent modes of embodiment?
Scholars are encouraged to investigate transformations of concepts, theories and practices across historical periods, disciplinary boundaries, and social contexts. How might we consider the migration of ideas from the humanities and arts to the information and biological sciences and vice-versa, or the mobilization of academic theories and conceptual networks by activist practices inside and outside of the academy. Such migrations, mobilities and networks need not be actual but could also be virtual in the mobilizations of ideas and artistic practices.
Qualifications
Fellows should be working on topics related to the year's theme. Their approach to the humanities should be broad enough to appeal to students and scholars in several humanistic disciplines.
Applicants must have received the Ph.D. degree before January 1, 2008. The Society for the Humanities will not consider applications from scholars who received the Ph.D. after this date. Applicants must also have one or more years of teaching experience which may include teaching as a graduate student.
Application Procedures
Candidates should inform the Society of their intention to apply by returning the attached form immediately. The following application materials must be postmarked on or before October 1, 2008. Faxed applications will not be accepted.
1. A curriculum vitae and a copy of one scholarly paper no more than 35 pages in length. Applicants who wish to have their materials returned should enclose a stamped, self-addressed envelope.
2. A one-page abstract in addition to a detailed statement of the research project the applicant would like to pursue during the term of the fellowship (1,000-3,000 words). Applicants are also encouraged to submit a working bibliography for their projects.
3. A brief (two-page) proposal for a seminar related to the applicant's research. Seminars meet two hours per week for one semester (fourteen weeks) and enrollment is limited to fifteen graduate students and qualified undergraduate students.
4. Three letters of recommendation from senior colleagues to whom candidates should send their research proposal and teaching proposal. Letters of recommendation should include an evaluation of the candidate's proposed research and teaching statements. Please ask referees to send their letters directly to the Society. Letters must be postmarked on or before October 1, 2008.
Send applications and letters of recommendation to:
Program Administrator
Society for the Humanities
A.D. White House
27 East Avenue
Cornell University
Ithaca, NY 14853-1101
For further information:
Phone: 607-255-9274
Email: humctr-mailbox@cornell.edu
http://www.arts.cornell.edu/sochum/fellowships.html
Awards will be announced by the end of December 2008.
Note: Extensions for applications will not be granted. The Society will consider only fully completed applications. It is the responsibility of each applicant to ensure that ALL documentation is complete, and that referees submit their letters of recommendation to the Society before the closing date.
The Society for the Humanities was established at Cornell University in 1966 to support research and encourage imaginative teaching in the humanities. It is intended to be at once a research institute, a stimulus to educational innovation, and a continuing society of scholars.
In addition to promoting research on central concepts, methods or problems in the humanities, the Society for the Humanities seeks to encourage serious and sustained discussion between teachers and learners at all levels of maturity.
Fellowships
Fellows include scholars from other universities and members of the Cornell faculty released from regular duties. The fellowships are held for one academic year. Each Society Fellow will receive $45,000. Applicants living outside North America are eligible for an additional $2000 to assist with travel costs
Fellows spend most of their time at Cornell in research and writing but are invited to offer one seminar related to their research. The choice of topic and the mode and level of instruction are at the pleasure of the Fellow, but the seminars are generally informal, related to the Fellow's research, and open to graduate students, suitably qualified undergraduates, and faculty members. Fellows are encouraged to explore topics they would not normally teach and, in general, to experiment freely with both the content and the method of their courses.
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Timothy Murray
Director, Society for the Humanities
http://www.arts.cornell.edu/sochum/
Curator, The Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, Cornell Library
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
A. D. White House
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853