2012-13 Society for the Humanities Postdoctoral Fellowships

2012-13 Society for the Humanities Postdoctoral Fellowships

Location: New York, United States
Fellowship Date: 2011-10-01
Date Submitted: 2011-07-28
Announcement ID: 186848

2012-2013 Society for the Humanities Postdoctoral Fellowships Focal Theme: RISK @ Humanities

The Society for the Humanities calls for scholarly reflections on risk. We seek interdisciplinary projects that reflect on historical, theoretical, and global understandings of risk as a concept and a reality that lies at the heart of the humanities and the arts. The Society wishes to open the question of how risk shapes the humanities and how the humanities might dialogue with broader biological, ecological, economic, and technological approaches to risk.

We invite considerations of how risk might be inherent to the humanities. Scholars could reflect on the relation of accident, danger, and uncertainty in cross-historical letters and arts. How might risk lie at the heart of ritual and religion / legislation and government / letters and art? Some scholars might consider the philosophy and anthropology of probability and chance or even the history or theory of gaming. How do scholarly and artistic practices that cut across and against boundaries depend on and profit from risk?

Questions of geographies and environments at risk raise adjacent considerations of travel, politics, and transgression. What is the relation of the humanities and the arts to “risk society,” “writers at risk,” or “risk territory”? From risky behavior and risky thinking to risk in sexuality or the risk of torture, from questions of terror to threats of surveillance, from the transgression of creative production to the mixtures of cultures, peoples, and religions, risk @ humanities sits on unstable terrain. What might it mean to research the humanities in relation to economic collapse, environmental degradation, immunological threat, or military incursion?

Artistic form and practice themselves also contribute to an ongoing understanding of risk. How might experiments in new media, performance, film, literature, music, art, and architecture articulate aesthetic interventions across the topography of risk? Might new electronic and digital networks, mobilities, and artistic projects threaten or empower the arts? Are indigenous or traditional practices at risk in the age of global communication and exchange? These questions are meant to suggest, not delimit, possible approaches to the focal theme.

Scholars are encouraged to investigate ideas, instances, and inferences of risk across geographies, historical periods, disciplinary boundaries, and social contexts. The Society for the Humanities welcomes applications from scholars and practitioners who are interested in investigating this topic from the broadest variety of international and disciplinary perspectives.

The David R. Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future co-sponsors one fellowship to support scholarly work addressing risk as it relates to energy, the environment or economic development.

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