The Center for Humanities Research is welcoming applications to be a CHR fellow for fall 2021 and spring 2022. Fellows will be released from two courses the semester of their fellowship so that they may focus on writing and on participating in the intellectual life of the CHR. Applications due April 16. Please see instructions below.
The CHR’s theme for next year is Pasts/Presents/Futures
Since March of 2020 we have been living in what political theorist Elizabeth Povinelli might call a “durative present.” In some ways the past, or pre-times, feels irretrievably lost, and the future unimaginable, just beyond our grasp. But it is equally true that this durative present has revealed that much of what we thought to be past, over and done with, lives on in the present. The Black Lives Matter protests, for instance, have made publicly visible how past racial violence infuses the present, what Saidiya Hartman has called the “afterlives of slavery.”
And neither, we have learned, does the future unfold as we think it will.
Furthermore, our attempts to articulate distinctions between pasts, presents, and futures, are predicated on conceptions of time and temporality that are neither neutral nor fixed. Conceptions of time have, historically, delimited what we are able and unable to see, lending visibility to certain events, peoples, and subjectivities while pushing others into obscurity. Temporal formations can constrain, do violence, or create possibilities; they can be mobilized in ways that normalize, or as strategies of resistance. Temporality permeates humanistic studies across periods, disciplines, genres, and geopolitical regions.
The Center for Humanities Research invites applications from faculty and advanced PhD candidates whose research takes up temporal encounters between pasts, presents, and futures in the broadest possible sense. We are open to all proposals that engage substantially with temporality as a theme (rather than primarily as a fact of research) and the problematic of past/present/future, including those that might address any of the following questions:
- What does the present tense open or foreclose, and for whom?
- Do societies, religions, states, individuals have an obligation to the past? To the future? How has that obligation been articulated in the many archives of the past (narrative, image, speech, ritual, or performance)?
- Is there an ethics of remembering?
- What is the temporality of change, and how is it initiated?
- What are the contours of futurity? How, and in what contexts, is it possible to imagine a different future?
These semester-long fellowships provide two course-releases (for tenure-line faculty) and tuition and stipend (for PhD students), and require residency at the center (participation in regular meetings with the cohort of fellows, public presentation of research, and attendance at all center events). We will accept fellows from as wide a range of disciplines, departments, and programs as possible working on projects related to our theme.
Applications are due on April 16. For more information on how to apply: https://chr.gmu.edu/2021-2022-chr-residential-fellowships-faculty-and-graduate-student/
April 06, 2021
