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SOCIETY FOR THE HUMANITIES
FACULTY FELLOWSHIPS 2008-2009
Eight semesters of Faculty Fellowships are awarded each year by our Board of External Advisors. Fellows' appointments are subject to the consent of their department chair and the approval of the Dean. Tradition has restricted fellowships to professors in humanities departments of the College of Arts and Sciences, though faculty members holding regular appointments elsewhere in the university are welcome to apply if their work is closely related to the year's theme and if their Dean is willing to provide their salary during their appointment at the Society.
Faculty Fellows receive leaves of absence from their departments, but not from Cornell; the College of Arts and Sciences has been allowing the time spent as a Faculty Fellow to count in computing regular sabbatic leave. A Faculty Fellow is paid the salary he or she would have received from his or her department, plus Cornell's contribution to fringe benefits. (Where necessary, departments negotiate with the Dean for funds to help provide replacement teaching.) Office space and clerical assistance in matters related to the Fellow's research are provided in the Andrew D. White Center for the Humanities.
Faculty Fellows are released from, and are expected to decline, the usual departmental, college, or university obligations. An exception is normally made for supervision of graduate student research in cases where an interruption would be detrimental to the student. Fellows are expected to spend most of their time in research and writing, but they offer a weekly seminar during one semester of the fellowship on a topic related to the Fellow's research and in keeping with the Society's focal theme. We prefer that these seminars be somewhat experimental and interdisciplinary -- in any case, not what you normally offer to satisfy established curricular requirements of your department.
APPLICATION PROCEDURES
If you should decide that you are interested in becoming a candidate, please send the following to Mary Ahl, Society for the Humanities,
A. D. White House (note especially item 5).
1. The names of three referees willing to supply confidential statements. One of the referees should be a colleague at Cornell; the other two, scholars at other institutions. Please inform your referees of our focal theme, your proposed plans for teaching and research, and ask them to forward their letters by October 31st.
Five copies each of the following
2. Curriculum vitae
3. No more than three of your articles
4. A brief statement concerning the research you expect to undertake during the tenure of your fellowship and how it relates to the theme for 2008/2009.
5. Short description of the seminars you propose to offer, suitable for the University Course Catalogue
We must stress the importance of our being able to supply all these materials to the External Advisory Board; it should be obvious that letters from distinguished referees at other institutions are extremely important. We might add that the Board generally gives special weight to candidates' descriptions of their proposed research and the contribution it might make to our understanding of the year's theme.
Please submit five copies of the above materials to Mary Ahl by October 31st. The External Advisory Board will meet in December and we shall announce the results of the election of the Faculty Fellows on December 18th.
Society for the Humanities
Focal Theme 2008-2009
Water, A Critical Concept for the Humanities
The Society for the Humanities calls for scholarly reflection on critical concepts of water from a broad range of disciplinary and inter-disciplinary perspectives. While well-established as a subject of literary, historical, political, and aesthetic analysis, water also traverses emergent fields of inquiry such as ecopoetics and ecopolitics, ancient studies, critical geography, mapping and cartography, environmental humanities, oceanic studies, indigenous studies, and studies of diasporic arts and cultures. Scholars have considered water as an object of conflict and contest, as boundary, and as divider of regions and cultures, but also as a source of life and wealth, and as a medium of communication, migration, transport, commerce, and redistribution.
As access to fresh water becomes one of the most contentious issues of the twenty-first century, the study of water as well as disputes over water rights, especially those involving indigenous peoples and minorities, have increasingly become a focus of inquiry from many different disciplines. While the classical themes of water travel and the healing properties of water are richly elaborated in literary, visual, and ethnographic texts, scholars also investigate the ideological connection between voyages of exploration, colonization, and scientific inquiry. From the complexities of ecopolitics or theorizations of chaos and sexual fluids to natural events such as floods, droughts, tsunami, and hurricanes, frameworks of water pose complex poetic, ethical, aesthetic, political, cultural, technological, and scientific challenges to the humanities. Critical reflection on water, ecology, and migration evokes current and future crises, extending from Australia to the Mediterranean Basin, from sub-Saharan Africa to India. While the Mediterranean is now being rethought as a distinctive unity across time and space, from prehistory to the present, involving encounters between African, Arab, and European worlds, the Indian Ocean is acknowledged as a center of exchange in early modern times. Trans-oceanic movement is studied in relation to the slave trade, to imperial expansion, exploration, and exploitation, as well as a feature of global cosmopolitanism. Thus powerful metaphors like the “Black Atlantic” and the “Pacific Rim” have emphasized continuous trans-oceanic dialogue and inter-continental exchange, allowing for reassessment of cultural products as hybrid forms transcending cultural and ethnic boundaries. Finally the enigmatic nature of water and corollary fluids has catalyzed exciting experiments in the arts, music, and performance while dialoguing with challenging work in theory and philosophy for which water has been an important referent. The Society for the Humanities welcomes applications from scholars and artists who theorize, research, and perform water as a critical concept for the humanities.
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