Call for Applications: Summer 2024 Doctoral Fellowships at the Center for Humanities Research, sponsored by the Graduate Division
Deadline March 20, 2024
The CHR is inviting applications for summer funding from Mason doctoral students who are working on their dissertations and who do not already have Mason summer funding. Each student awarded a fellowship will receive a stipend of $8,500.
While we will consider all humanities and humanities-related projects, special consideration will be given to those who are able to connect their work, even very loosely, to any aspect of our annual theme for AY 2024-5, “humanity and its others” (see full theme description below).
Instructions:
Application should be submitted as a single PDF document and include the following:
--A project title;
--A 250-word proposal that describes your dissertation, including what specifically you plan to do over the summer;
--Your home department and your dissertation committee members;
--A CV;
--And 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).
Please email your application to chr@gmu.edu by noon on Wednesday, March 20, 2024.
We ask that recipients of this summer funding publicly present their research in an informal lunchtime talk during the next academic year. Fellows will also attend each other's talks.
Eligibility requirements:
--Applicants must be Mason doctoral students listed in university records as full-time during Spring 2024 and must plan to return as a graduate student in Fall 2024.
--Applicants must have advanced to candidacy by time of application.
--GPA 3.0 and good standing
--Receive no other funding from Mason over the summer
--Previous recipients of this award may not reapply
2024-25 Annual Theme: humanity and its others
In a world increasingly hostile both to the humanities and to the maintenance and flourishing of humanity, this year's annual theme calls for critical engagements, across different periods, places, and disciplines, with the qualities and category of "humanity" and with the borders, limits, doubles, analogues, antitheses, and "others" of these things.
Humanity has been imagined both as a quality intrinsic to human beings and as an acquired characteristic, something that must be cultivated and nurtured, an ideal toward which humans strive. Though at times conceived in relation to what transcends it (gods, heroes, superhumans), a sense of the value of humanness has led to critiques of human degradation, that is, of dehumanization, of subhuman subordination, of "crimes against humanity."
Some thinkers have elevated humanity over other forms of being, giving rise to doctrines of exceptionalism, extractivism, and imperialism. Moreover, the classification of humans based on religion, race, nation, gender, class, education, intelligence, neurodiversity, criminality, morality, talent, beauty, and other normative qualities has often imposed hierarchies of humanness. Other thinkers have sought to dissolve the boundaries between humanity and its others and to examine the entanglement of humans with non-human "nature,” supernatural/superhuman beings, and manifestations of the divine.
More recently, the impending possibility of artificial general intelligence, alongside advances in genetic engineering and robotics and the pressures of anthropogenic climate change, raises new questions about the future of humanity. What kinds of transhuman or posthuman, hybrid, collaborative or competitive possibilities are there for humans? Is “humanity” a concept and a value that we wish to discard or to protect?
We seek proposals that interrogate, decenter, redefine, or traverse the boundaries between humanity and its “others” -- that investigate and analyze how humanity has been conceived and contested, how it has been nurtured and sustained or deformed and denied, how it has served as an essential value or as an evaluative yardstick, how it has helped to construct worlds that are hospitable or inhuman.
February 27, 2024