MIT’s School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences awards two fellowships each year to promising young scholars working at the intersection of humanities disciplines, or between humanities and other disciplines. This Fellowship is especially intended for scholars who work in more than one specialty within the humanities, or bridging from the humanities to science, technology, or architecture.

Applicants must designate the academic unit in which they would like to be located. Units at MIT include Anthropology, History, Literature, Foreign Languages and Literatures, Political Science, Writing and Humanistic Studies, Comparative Media Studies, Music and Theater Arts, and the Program in Science, Technology and Society. Appointments will be for two years, effective July 1, 2012. Fellows will teach one course in Spring 2013 and one per semester the following year, and will be in residence at MIT during this time.

Click here for more information and application procedures. FYI, Applicants should have received their Ph.D. no earlier than July 1, 2009 and no later than July 1, 2012. Fellows will be announced in March 2012.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art offers annual resident fellowships in art history to qualified graduate students at the predoctoral level as well as to postdoctoral researchers. Projects should relate to the Museum’s collections. The fields of research for art history candidates include Asian art, arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, antiquities, arms and armor, costumes, drawings, illuminated manuscripts, paintings, photographs, prints, sculpture, textiles, and Western art. Some art history fellowships for travel abroad are also available for students whose projects involve firsthand examination of paintings in major European collections.

The application deadline for art history fellowships awarded for the 2012–2013 year is November 4, 2011. Learn more about applying for an art history fellowship at the Met.

Opportunities associated with the National Gallery of Art

The National Gallery of Art’s Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts announces its annual program of support for advanced graduate research in the history, theory, and criticism of art, architecture, and urbanism. Each of the following nine fellowships has specific requirements and intents, including support for the advancement and completion of a doctoral dissertation, for residency and travel during the period of dissertation research, and for postdoctoral research. Application for a predoctoral fellowship may be made only through nomination by the chair of the graduate department of art history or other appropriate departments. To be eligible, the nominee must have completed all departmental requirements, including course work, residency, and general and preliminary examinations, before November 15, 2006. Certification in two languages other than English is required. Candidates must be either United States citizens or enrolled in a university in the United States.

Learn more about applying.

The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) is pleased to offer fellowships generously funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for dissertation research in the humanities or related social sciences in original sources. The purposes of this fellowship program are to:

• help junior scholars in the humanities and related social science fields gain skill and creativity in developing knowledge from original sources
• enable dissertation writers to do research wherever relevant sources may be, rather than just where financial support is available
• encourage more extensive and innovative uses of original sources in libraries, archives, museums, historical societies, and related repositories in the U.S. and abroad, and
• provide insight from the viewpoint of doctoral candidates into how scholarly resources can be developed for access most helpfully in the future.

The program offers about fifteen competitively awarded fellowships a year. Each provides a stipend of $2,000 per month for periods ranging from 9-12 months. Each fellow will receive an additional $1,000 upon participating in a symposium on research in original sources and submitting a report acceptable to CLIR on the research experience. Thus the maximum award will be $25,000.

Click the embedded link above for details and deadlines.

Welcome to a new school year! Note the information session (Aug. 30). Register by Aug. 24 for this important workshop (information courtesy of Franklin Humanities Institute):

Tara McPherson: Graduate Student Workshop on Humanities Scholarship in the Digital Age

Date: Thursday, September 1, 2011 – 12:00pm – 2:00pm

Location: FHI Garage – C105, 1st Floor, Bay 4, Smith Warehouse

This is the first event in a speaker series on humanities scholarship in the digital age, which we are launching in conjunction with the new FHI digital publication initiative for graduate students. On Tuesday, August 30, we are hosting an information session on the new initiative for all interested humanities/interpretive social sciences PhD students. To sign up for the info session and/or the McPherson workshop, click here to complete the registration form (by August 24). Please note that space is limited for the workshop.

Liminalities seeks submissions of performance projects, video and audio pieces, essays, position papers, artist pages, and other works that explore the theme of “accidents” in terms of performance and performativity. Please think broadly about the idea of accident: from the sudden disaster to the chance encounter to the productive mistake; from Aristotle’s accidental forms to Virilio’s original accident; from serendipity and fate, to misadventure and calamity, to the nature of tragedy itself. You may consider performative responses to accidents, the role of the accidental in acts of creativity, or the ontology of chance in performance and performativity.

Please send abstracts or descriptions of projects to Michael LeVan (mlevan@tampabay.rr.com or mlevan@usf.edu) by 1 September 2011. Completed works of accepted proposals should be submitted by 1 December 2011. Anticipated publication date is 1 March 2012.

“On Money” (Special Issue/Forum)
Call for Papers and Projects

Liminalities seeks submissions of performance projects, video and audio pieces, essays, position papers, artist pages, and other works that explore the theme of “money” in terms of performance and performativity. As the unstable fabulation of the money system has shown in recent years, money is a dangerous and fickle performer. Money performs; yet, significantly, money is also something performed (by individuals, institutions, and nations). Possible topics for addressing money and performance include (but are not limited to):

Poverty
Wealth
Finance
Mobility
Politics
Globalization
Exchange
Money as a weapon
Money as medium
Money as magic
Money and fabulation
Money and risk
Money and reward
Money as art objects/subjects
Money metaphors
Performance and “markets”
Biopower and biopolitics
Modernity and altermodernity
Alternative economies

Please send abstracts or descriptions of projects to Michael LeVan (mlevan@tampabay.rr.com or mlevan@usf.edu) by 1 October 2011. Completed works of accepted proposals should be submitted by 1 February 2011. Anticipated publication date is 1 June 2012.

Photography and Culture Issue — Wasting Nature: Ecocriticism and Photography

Deadline For Abstracts: September 1st, 2011

Henry Fox Talbot famously described photography as the “pencil of nature.” Although this metaphor refers to photography’s special relationship to the real, to the indexicality that makes it suited for naturalist representation, Talbot’s evocative phrase also raises important questions about photography’s relationship to nature. Indeed, nature remains an abiding passion among contemporary practitioners as it was among early
photographers. Beyond naturalism and nature appreciation, however, how has photography approached nature?

The editors of Photography and Culture invite submissions that explore the theoretical, historical and interdisciplinary dimensions of ecocriticism and photography. In what ways has photography participated in conservation movements? How have photographers contributed to ecological consciousness? Has an attention to aesthetics helped or hindered this project? To what extent might photography be complicit in wasteful practices?  We are interested in papers that consider the ecocritical implications of photography from the perspectives of the media, artists, and activists.

Possible topics could include, among others:

the documentation of nuclear catastrophe and global warming;

the visual vocabulary of ecological consciousness;

the photographic practices of the green movement.

Abstracts of no more than 500 words, along with a short cv (maximum 1 page), should be sent by 1 September, 2011, to the following address: pceditors@gmail.com. Notification regarding the abstracts will be sent by 1 October 2011. Articles of 7000- 9000 words will be required by 1 December 2011 and will be submitted to an external peer-review process. The special issue will appear in Spring 2012.

Editors:
Kathy Kubicki             (kathykubicki@btinternet.com)
Thy Phu                       (tphu@uwo.ca)
Valerie Williams        (valredhouse@aol.com)

Assistant Editor
Monica Takvam           (mtakvam@gmail.com)

Topic: Precarity / Precarious Situations

Editors Rebecca Schneider and Nicholas Ridout for TDR and Tavia Nyong’o for W&P

Precarity is life lived in relation to a future which can not be propped securely upon the past. Precarity undoes a linear streamline of temporal progression and challenges “progress” and “development” narratives on all levels. Precarity has become a byword for life in late and later capitalism—or, some argue, life in capitalism as usual.

Life and work, and their dependence upon one another, are often imagined as increasingly precarious, their futures shadowed by pervasive terror as well as everyday anxieties about work. At the same time, “creative capital” invests a kind of promise in precarity with words like “innovation,” “failure,” “experiment,” and “arts.” The links here between art and terror, art and loss, art and vanishing, point also to connections with performance and the embodied balancing act of the live performer.

How do we pay attention to precarity—economic precarity, neoliberal precarity—through a close reading of the performing body? At one time, claims for resistance to commodity capitalism were addressed through the idea that performance does not offer an object for sale. What of the performing body in an economy where the laboring body, and its production of affect, is the new commodity du jour? Marx already gives us the immaterial commodity that is labor itself. Can we think about this through the labor of performance?

Does the place of the arts in global capitalism, and the particular relations implied by “affective labor,” mean that, in some ways, theatrical labor has a particular purchase on the contemporary scene in which such life and work appears? Might this in part account for the recent (re)turn to performance as the hottest contemporary art of the 21st century in such institutions formerly known as devotees of the art object as the MoMA, the Guggenheim, the Tate, the Getty. While precarity has been brought to the fore in European activist circles, we are especially interested in analyses that test its utility in Asian, African, and American contexts. We also are interested in approaches that seek to connect the political-economic usage of precariousness with the ethical and psychoanalytic valences of the term that have also emerged.

How might longstanding feminist critiques of unwaged emotional labor (including feminist art practices of institutional critique) be brought to bear on the new configurations of relational and participatory aesthetics? And how do interactive, installation, and ambient art practices take their place within what some have termed “the social factory,” and its scramble to valorize ever new horizons of volunteered productivity? And how might these debates around precarity be revivified by an analytic attuned to the predicament of the Global South, to the prison-industrial complex, and to contemporary regimes of racialization and neo-colonization?

We aim to explore how theatre and performance studies might resource a continuation of the thinking of precarity. Can the not-not work of theatre and its production of subjectivities offer productive (or un-productive) ways of thinking about changes in the nature of work, its place in the life of the present, and its relation to futurity?

We are interested in precarity’s affects. The manipulation of affect is stock in trade for theatrical and performance labor, and much art production in a post-Fordist economy driven as much by the manufacture of affects as commodities as by material goods. If affect is constitutively relational—or between bodies—how might it be understood as social and political? Are we living in the affect factory?

Special Note: TDR and W&P are engaging in a collaborative process of developing these two issues. While they will appear separately and sequentially within the run of the respective journals, the editors will work collaboratively. Essays and projects that embrace the possibilities opened up between seriality and precarity are especially welcome.

The deadline for TDR issue “Precarity” is 15 November 2011: Please send a digital abstract and essay to Rebecca Schneider at Rebecca_Schneider@brown.edu.

The deadline for W&P issue “Precarious situations: feminist genealogies, affective labor, and outsourced performance” is 1 March 2012: Please send an abstract and essay to Tavia Nyong’o at tavia.nyongo@nyu.edu.