Humanities Opportunities

The John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage at Brown University invites applications for a postdoctoral fellow in public humanities for the academic year 2012-13. While the nature of an applicant’s specific interests and areas of expertise is left open, these should be complementary to the present makeup of the Center. Areas of interest: documentary studies, community memory, digital public humanities, cultural heritage, cultural policy, and historic preservation. Applicants must normally have received their Ph.D. from an institution other than Brown within the last five years and have expertise and experience working in the public humanities, and an interest in working with students in an interdisciplinary and public context. In addition to pursuing his or her own projects, the successful candidate will be expected to teach one course per semester, and participate actively in the ongoing development of the Center, via organization of reading or working groups or community projects that extend or develop new university-community connections. This will be a one-year position, beginning on July 1, 2012, with possibility of extension to a second year. For details, consult the CFP.

Named in honor of the founding editor of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, the Catharine Stimpson Prize is designed to recognize excellence and innovation in the work of emerging feminist scholars and is awarded biannually to the best paper in an international competition. Leading feminist scholars from around the globe will select the winner. The prizewinning paper will be published in Signs, and the author will be provided an honorarium of $1,000. All papers submitted for the Stimpson Prize will be considered for peer review and possible publication in Signs. Eligibility: Feminist scholars in the early years of their careers (less than seven years since receipt of the terminal degree) are invited to submit papers for the Stimpson Prize. Papers may be on any topic that falls within the broad rubric of interdisciplinary feminist scholarship. For details, visit Sign's website.

Spaces of Resistance, scheduled for July 29-August 8, 2012, will investigate various strategies of non-violent popular resistance and how they unfold spatially using multidisciplinary frames of reference and methods of reading/analysis. This 8th Seminar in Experimental Critical Theory will explore the spatialities and speeds of resistance to dominant and exclusionary power structures, how spaces are shaped by and produced through various forms and temporalities of resistance, and how they can enable or impede resistance. Emphasis will be placed on the revolutions currently sweeping the Arab world. The seminar will also engage the various ways in which established powers attempt to foreclose the possibilities of space through forms of abstraction, development plans, and the creation of closed commemorative spaces. Particular attention will be placed on space(s) as "contested" materially and imaginatively, and to locate resistance within the attempts of power to determine and control space. Seminar Co-conveners: Saree Makdisi, English, UCLA  Howayda al-Harithy, Architecture and Design, American University of Beirut Mona Fawaz, Urban Studies and Planning, American University of Beirut David Theo Goldberg, Director, UC Humanities Research Institute TO APPLY: Visit the Seminar in Experimental Critical Theory website. For fullest consideration please apply by Tuesday, February 21, 2012. Applications will be accepted through 5:00 pm on Monday, March 5, but seminar space is limited and applications will be considered in the order in which they are received.

This MLA special session panel will focus on discussions of race, ethnicity and access within the digital humanities.  Scholars such as Alan Liu, Tara McPherson and Lisa Nakamura have argued that cultural studies approaches and methodologies have been consistently overlooked by much of DH scholarship. Race and the Digital Humanities will explore how race and ethnicity are important structural categories of analysis in the digital humanities. How do race and ethnicity factor into questions of access within the digital humanities? How are digital humanities tools calibrated to take into account the effects of race and ethnicity? How is race configured in different types of social media? How can silences and ellipses in discussions on race in the digital humanities be mapped onto privilege in whiteness studies? Finally, how are newly emergent movements such as #transformDH (‘transform digital humanities’) creating change in this methodological divide, and in which fields? To be considered for this special session panel, please submit a one-page abstract and CV to Adeline Koh at adelinekoh@gmail.com.