The Society for the Humanities at Cornell University is currently accepting applications for residential fellowships from scholars whose work fits their 2020-21 theme: Fabrication. Society Fellows receive $52,000 for a one-year appointment, during which they will teach one small seminar appropriate for graduate students and advanced undergraduates. Fellows are also expected to hold office hours on campus, attend academic events and lectures, and participate in a weekly Fellows Seminar workshopping each other’s projects and discussing readings based on the yearly theme.
From the Society for the Humanities’ theme description of “Fabrication”:
Embodying two strands of production – creation and concoction, making and faking, forming and falsifying – fabrications are both made up and made real. Fabrication is bound up with fiction, language, and storytelling: from spinning a yarn and weaving a tale through embellishment to lying and falsehood. Fabrication recalls the old adage that ‘the poets lie,’ pondering the relation between invention and deception. While today it seems that the pejorative sense of fabrication often falls to politicians, this dual valence nonetheless raises the question of whether art, fiction, narrative, and historiography ever fully extricate themselves from suspicion. This is especially the case in the age of quantification and ‘hard data,’ with its attendant effects on the humanities – and yet numbers without narrative tell us nothing, have no story to tell.
Applications are due October 1, 2019.
For more information on fellowship requirements and the application process, visit the Society for the Humanities’ call for applications.