Research Fellowship Application Deadline

Deadline for 2027-28 cycle: Friday, December 4, 2026

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Background

A UW System Center of Excellence, UWM’s Center for 21^st Century Studies (C21) builds a community of scholars to address the pressing issues of our time. Each year, C21 offers fellowships to UWM faculty and academic staff that provide the time, space, and collegial support to generate new knowledge and ideas. C21 centers the humanities in its belief that innovation comes from diversity of opinions, disciplines, and experiences. 

Theme

C21 has identified PUBLIC GOOD as the theme that informs our offerings for the next three years (2027-2030). We will explore efforts to define and defend as well as to challenge and restrict shared resources, common infrastructures, and collective responsibilities, questioning the meanings of “public” and “good” as founded on exclusion as much as inclusion and shaped by shifting concepts of citizenship, community, and obligation. With privatization, individualism, and short-term self-interest increasingly determining our current social, political, and ecological landscapes, this theme asks what it means to share things in common with others and to reimagine the possibilities of collective life, while simultaneously reckoning with competing histories of who defines and deserves access to the common and the collective, and on whose terms that access is granted or denied. The theme is intentionally broad to capture a wide range of scholarship and practice while encouraging innovative methodologies.    

C21’s 2027-2028 programming focuses on PUBLIC GOOD: EDUCATION. What does it mean to define education as a public good? Who counts as public, and what counts as good? C21 takes up these questions while considering the contested histories of access alongside changing ideas of who and what education serves. We will also consider how the humanities in particular position education beyond workforce preparedness to include the cultivation of civic responsibility and the capacity to interpret, deliberate, and speculate with others about the world around us, as well as to reimagine more capacious forms of education than the institutionalized ones that we have inherited. 

We welcome multiple interpretations of this open topic, including broader explorations of “public” and “good” as they relate to pressing issues of our time and/or work inside and outside the university. Applicants can choose to apply with projects that align with education as a subtheme, or that relate to the overarching theme of public good. 

Research Projects

Applicants should propose a research project related to this thematic area.  Projects can be individual or collaborative.  Examples of projects include:

• Researching / preparing material for public presentation in a wide variety of forms including (but not limited to) monographs, essays, podcasts, performances; art installation/exhibits, community programs; digital interfaces; archives or artifacts.    
• Researching for / development of large-scale collaborative projects (grant proposals, building networks etc.).   
• Researching / preparing syllabi for innovative, interdisciplinary team-teaching initiatives or credit-bearing programs such as certificates, minors, degrees. 

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