National Park Service

Post-Doctoral Fellowship in Public Humanities

Postdoctoral Fellowship in Public Humanities

The National Park Service (NPS) and the National Park Foundation (NPF) invite scholars who are no more than five years beyond receipt of the doctorate to apply for a one-year National Park Service Mellon Public Humanities Postdoctoral fellowship.

The National Park Service, which preserves and interprets many of America’s iconic historic places, is planning events to commemorate the 250^th Anniversary of the American Revolution. A goal is to connect the public, partners, and NPS sites to the 250^th commemoration of the nation’s founding in bold and forward-looking ways. Through programming, virtual events, and digital engagement, the National Park Service will invite the public to probe provocative and resonant questions that underscore the nation’s founding and continue to shape our collective pursuit of the American Promise.  NPS seeks a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Public Humanities to help us do this work.

The Covid-19 pandemic and the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement will forever characterize 2020. Social justice concerns have brought together new coalitions of people, new ways of organizing, and political actions across the country, from large metropolitan cities to rural, small towns, touching all Americans. The renewed energy behind the BLM movement has challenged businesses and organizations to examine their own practices, biases, and systems in an effort to confront and dismantle systemic racism. The National Park Service wishes to capture, understand, and memorialize this moment in history and connect the present to the past. Indeed, 2020 marks the 250th anniversary of the Boston Massacre, a seminal event in America’s history of resistance, whose first martyr was Crispus Attucks, a Black and Native American man who escaped from slavery. As we approach the 250^th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, we wish to highlight the arc of America’s moral universe struggling to bend toward justice.

This Postdoctoral Fellow will thus examine public places, monuments, memorials, invented traditions, and memory and how they are being contested as America grapples with its historical consciousness and its grand narrative.  This Fellowship will contribute to the effort to bridge gaps between the academic and the popular to better tell the story of America from its roots laid out in our early founding documents to the present day.

Specifically, the Fellow will focus on the act of commemoration.  The Fellow will select public places, monuments, memorials, ephemera, and invented traditions and examine them from their creation to the present day or from their creation today to the past. A series of essential questions framing the research could include:
      • How have people appropriated these places and memorials to support their own belief systems? How, when and why were certain legacies secured?
Who benefited? Who resisted?
      • How have they been used over time to express grief or joy, dissent or consent, power or subordination, and other values?
      • How have they been designed to include, exclude, identify, politicize, unify or divide?
      • How do these symbols help us as a nation contextualize our evolving value systems as we strive for a “more perfect union”?

Products will be designed in consultation with National Park Service staff and will include items such as:
      1. Applied research relevant to the theme of the fellowship.
      2. Presentations to NPS staff service-wide via online seminars.
      3. Interpretive or Educational products based on their scholarly research.
      4. Career-focused research and product. The Fellow will dedicate up to 20 percent of their time to pursue research on a career-centered project.

Applicants must possess US citizenship and have a Ph.D. in the humanities or humanistic social sciences by August 2020 (history, museology, archaeology, philosophy, ethnic studies, women’s studies, American Studies, anthropology, or related disciplines). Applicants must demonstrate comfort with working collaboratively and across disciplinary boundaries; excellent research, writing, and communication skills; flexibility and the capacity to learn quickly; and a strong interest in public scholarship. Selective factors include the merit of scholarship and promise, commitment to the public humanities, and capacity to complete research successfully. Fellowship is contingent upon a successful security background check.

Application: Applications must be submitted in pdf format by email only to publichumanities2020@nationalparks.org with the subject line: last name, first name – 2020 Public Humanities Fellowship. For best consideration, apply by August 14, 2020.
Include:
      1.  cover letter stating interest and vision for the fellowship (letters may include a summary of the dissertation, a statement of personal research interests and plans, discussion of past engagement with public humanities, discussion of willingness to participate fully in NPS research and education programs);
      2.  comprehensive curriculum vitae;
      3.  writing sample accessible to the general public;
      4.  confirmation of Ph.D. award by August 1, 2020; and
      5.  three letters of recommendation. The letters of recommendation should be sent directly by the recommender to publichumanities2020@nationalparks.org with the subject line: LETTER last name, first name - 2020-Public Humanities.

The one-year Fellowship begins October 1, 2020 and ends September 30, 2021.  The location is Philadelphia, PA, with potential for remote work.  NPS will provide the Fellow with a workstation.  Compensation is $63,650, plus a $7000 allowance for health benefits, and $3000 for research costs (conferences and publications).  Travel funding is provided separately.  The Fellowship may not be held concurrently with any other fellowship or grant or employment (part-time or full-time).