Harvard University, Mahindra Humanities Center
Mahindra Humanities Center Postdoctoral Fellow
Institution Type: | College / University |
Location: | Massachusetts, United States |
Position: | Post-Doctoral Fellow |
Description
The Mahindra Humanities Center invites applications for one-year postdoctoral fellowships in connection with the Center’s Andrew W. Mellon Foundation seminar on the topic of migration and the humanities.
Migration plays as critical a role in the moral imagination of the humanities as it does in shaping the activist vision of humanitarianism and human rights. Too often, the humanities are summoned merely as witnesses to the spectacle of the significant currents and crises of contemporary life. Literature and the arts are viewed as iconic presences whose primary aesthetic and moral values lie in their illustrative powers of empathy and evocation. Yet the intellectual formation of the humanities—their very conception of the nature of meaning, knowledge, and morals—is deeply resonant with the displacement of values and the revision of norms that shape the transitional and translational narratives of migrant lives.
Built around pedagogies of representation and interpretation—textual, visual, digital, political, ethical, ecological, etc.—the humanities engage with the history of shifting relations between cultural expression, historical transition, and political transformation. The ethics of citizenship in our time are defined as much by migration and resettlement as by indigenous belonging, as much by global governance as by national sovereignty. And the humanities play a central role in defining the terms and the territories of cultural citizenship as it creates innovative institutions and identities in the making of a civil society.
The migration “crisis” makes it imperative for humanists to reflect on the foundational concepts and values of our disciplines in addressing the representation of others as they are recognized in the norms of cultural citizenship. The issues the seminar will explore include: the ethics of hospitality; modes of cosmopolitanism; negotiation of cultural “differences” under duress; the role played by interpretation and cultural translation in enhancing processes of social integration.
We welcome applications from scholars in all fields whose work innovatively engages with migration and the humanities.
How do we understand the relationship between cultural memory as personal or collective narrative and the institutional demands of the legal discourse of memory used as a protocol of evidence that establishes the migrant’s claim to refuge, asylum and/or citizenship? What is the relationship between the affective aspects of migrant memory, such as fear, anxiety, humiliation, trauma, hope, and wish fulfillment, and the truth conditions encoded in jurisprudence and political rationality?
What are the narrative forms and discursive modes that constitute archives of migration, both contemporary and historical? What are the technologies and politics of these representations? How do archives of migrations function as purveyors of information, systems of classification, conduits of dissemination that create new public knowledge?
Terms and Conditions
In addition to pursuing their own research projects, fellows will be core participants in the bi-weekly seminar meetings. Other participants will include faculty and graduate students from Harvard and other universities in the region, and occasional visiting speakers.
Fellows will receive stipends of $65,000, individual medical insurance, and additional research support of $2,500. Fellows not already in residence in Greater Boston are eligible for $1,500 in moving expenses. In addition to pursuing their own research projects, fellows will be core participants in the bi-weekly seminar meetings for both academic terms of the fellowship. In the fall semester they will present an article-length paper to the university-wide Mellon Seminar on Migration and the Humanities. For the spring semester, fellows will collaborate on a syllabus and present to the seminar as it runs in conjunction with a graduate-level course on the literature of migration offered by the English Department. Fellows are expected to be in residence at Harvard for the term of the fellowship.
Eligibility and Deadline Information
Applicants for 2019-20 fellowships must have received a doctorate or terminal degree in or after May 2016. Applicants without a doctorate or terminal degree must demonstrate that they will receive a doctorate or terminal degree in a related discipline in or before August 2019.
The application deadline has been extended to January 2, 2019.
Application Instructions
Please apply using our online application:
http://academicpositions.harvard.edu/postings/8396
In addition to biographical and professional information, applicants are asked to submit:
1. A curriculum vitae.
2. A statement of the research project (1,000-3,000 words) that provides a detailed description of what the applicant proposes to do during the fellowship year.
3. One chapter- or article-length writing sample (no longer than 40 pages).
4. Names and contact information of three referees, who will be asked by a system-generated email to upload a letter of recommendation once the candidate’s application has been submitted. Three letters of recommendation are required, and the application is considered complete only when three letters have been received. Recommendations may be those included in the applicant’s placement dossier, but they must specifically address the proposed research project. Letters should be uploaded to the electronic application.
Please contact Dr. Andrea Volpe with questions about applying for a fellowship.
Contact: |
Dr. Andrea Volpe |
Website: | http://mahindrahumanities.fas.harvard.edu/content/postdoctoral-fellowships |
Primary Category: | Humanities |
Secondary Categories: | Art / Art History Immigration History / Studies Law and Legal History Social Sciences |
Posting Date: | 12/05/2018 |
Closing Date | 01/02/2019 |