The CHR is inviting applications for summer funding from doctoral students working on their dissertations (you must have already advanced to candidacy). We hope to fund two students (stipend of $6K). While we will consider all projects within the humanities, special consideration will be given to those who are able to connect their projects, even very loosely, to any aspect of the theme for AY 2023-4, “Democracy, Disposability, Repair” (see description below).
Application should be submitted as a PDF single document including all of the following items:
1. A 250-word proposal that describes your dissertation, and what specifically you plan to do over the summer;
2. Indicate department and list your dissertation committee;
3. Include your CV;
4. Include a simple budget (indicate if you require funding for a research trip, or if this funding would enable you to work exclusively on your dissertation instead of teaching).
You are not eligible for this award if you already have some form of funding for the summer.
We ask that recipients of this summer funding publicly present their research in an informal presentation next academic year.
Email application as a single pdf document to chr@gmu.edu by 12pm, Tuesday, April18th.
Applicants may apply for a grant of up to $3,000 to support humanities-related research. All Mason tenure track and term faculty members (on a 9-month contract) are eligible to apply, and applications from term faculty are especially welcome.
We welcome applications from faculty across the university; you need not be in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences to apply as long as your project has a humanities dimension, or is humanities-related.
Your application should include the following:
1. A one-page project description (and please indicate whether you have previously received funding for this project);
2. Budget (with explanation if necessary);
3. CV.
The budget may include travel funding, a summer stipend (so that one might not have to teach), and costs associated with book production (except for subvention), among other research costs.
Please note that in any given year a faculty member may not receive both a CHR residential fellowship and summer funding.
Please submit a SINGLE DOCUMENT PDF labeled with your last name leading (ex. Smith CHR Summer Funding Application) to chr@gmu.edu before the deadline- Monday, April 3, 2023.
If you are awarded a CHR Summer Research Grant, you will be asked to participate in a CHR event in either fall 2023 or spring 2024—we might ask you to present your work alongside colleagues in a showcase event (here’s the event we hosted for our Summer 2021 awardees) or call upon you to moderate a conversation at one of our public events. You can also propose an event or format of your own.
This year’s annual theme calls for literary, cultural, historical, philosophical, artistic, linguistic, anthropological, religious, and archival engagements with the question of disposability.
Forms of disposability have been characteristic (or even constitutive) of modes of social and political life, past, present, and in envisioned futures: the dispossession, relocation, and annihilation of local populations; the forced transportation of enslaved and bonded persons; the migration of refugees escaping war, violence, oppression, famine, and environmental and climate crises; the rule of a necropolitics in various spaces beyond the rule of law (whether within, between, or beyond the boundaries of states); the tyranny of oppressive majorities in majoritarian democracies; the violation of the voiceless and of those whose voices have been suppressed or silenced in public and private spheres; the effort to erase cultures or communities, to plunder and destroy ecosystems--these and other forms of rendering people and places "disposable" haunt and hound the world we live in. To what extent are historical and contemporary political systems dependent on forms of disposability, precarity, and extraction? In what ways are democratic modes of governance bound up with the disposability of human and non-human life? Could democracy offer possibilities for resistance, reparation and repair? We are interested in work that interrogates the intersections of disposability, democracy, capitalism, and environmental and social justice, past and present. How might these issues be illuminated by approaches drawn from the critical humanities including feminist, queer, indigenous, transnational, decolonial, post-humanist, dis/ability, and antiracist theories and methodologies?
Samira Alkassim (Term Assistant Professor of Film Theory) will finish work on her forthcoming book, A Journey of Screens in 21st Century Arab Film and Media.
Jennifer Ashley (Term Associate Professor of Global Affairs) will travel to Chile to conduct further research to create a digital exhibit on the participation of the Mapuche, Chile’s largest Indigenous group, in the country’s democratization processes.
Michael Gilmore (Associate Professor, School of Integrative Studies) will travel to Peru to research travel for his co-authored book, River of Resistance: Fighting for Indigenous Rights and Environmental Justice in the Peruvian Amazon.
Davis Kuykendall (Term Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy) will delve into research for his project that explores the philosophy of biology alongside the 17th century German philosopher, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.
Jessica Terman (Associate Professor, Schar School of Policy and Government) will further her research into the history and processes Title IX complaints and investigations.
Hyunyoung Cho (Term Associate Professor, English, Mason Korea) will receive support for her article-length project, "Birds and Bugs in 'To His Coy Mistress': Re-working Egyptian Solar Mythology in the Age of Bacon."
Heather Green (Assistant Professor, InterArts, School of Art) will continue work on (Never) Post-DADA: A Tristan Tzara Reader (1923-1963).
Amaka Okechukwu (Assistant Professor, Sociology and Anthropology, CHSS) will hire a research assistant for her digital humanities project, "Black Belt Brooklyn: Mapping Community Building and Social Life during the Urban Crisis."
Cathy Saunders (Instructional Professor of English, CHSS) will complete the early stages of her project on the history of the Lewinsville Presbyterian Church, including the creation of an Omeka-S site that will make key primary documents, including wills and associated inventories of enslaved people, publicly available.
Peiyu Yang (Term Assistant Professor of Arabic Studies, Modern and Classical Languages, CHSS) will finish work on her book, Triangular Translation: Gender and the Making of the Postcolonial World Between China, Europe, and the Middle East, 1880-1940.
Tawnya Azar, Term Assistant Professor of English, will be working on a book manuscript entitled, Digital Literary Culture
Charles L. Chavis, Jr., Assistant Professor of Conflict Resolution and History, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution, will be working on a Digital Exhibit and Discussion Guide which builds on his upcoming publication, “The Silent Shore: The Lynching of Matthew Williams and the Politics of Racism in the Free State.”
Kevin M. Flanagan, Term Assistant Professor of English, will be working on a chapter, for an edited volume, entitled, “Taste, Paternalism, and London Bohemianism: The Party’s Over (1965) through Censorship and Cultural History.”
Huwy-min Lucia Liu, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Anthropology, will be working on a book manuscript tentatively titled Governing Death, Making Persons: The New Chinese Way of Death.