Interdisciplinary Dissertation Prospectus Workshop
June 30-July 2 and September 15-16, 2008

Application deadline: Wednesday, April 16, 2008
Call for applications

Program Overview

This workshop will bring together ten graduate students with two faculty members, Eva Cherniavsky (English) and Nikhil Singh (History), to consider the issues and methods of designing interdisciplinary dissertation research in the field of American studies, broadly conceived. In addition to specifically U.S.-centered work, the rubric is meant to invite multi-sited research projects where the U.S. represents one site in a comparative matrix (or a study of flows), as well as work on globalization that attends to practices of U.S. imperialism or processes of "Americanization." Topics currently at the forefront of interdisciplinary American studies research include:

• diaspora, migration, immigration
• citizenship, belonging, and dispossession
• reconfigurations of the modern nation-state
• imperialism and racial formation
• biopolitics and governmentality
• (new) media, embodiment, identity
• space, place, and identity

Participants' research may range in and across these capacious categories, but should demonstrate a genuinely interdisciplinary focus on knowledge formations within multiple disciplines – and more exactly, on the possibilities and limits of disciplinary knowledge production as it has both fostered and foreclosed specific kinds of research on these topics.

Structure

The workshop will take place over two, three-day intensive sessions: June 30-July 2 and September 22-24. The first session will be devoted to reading and discussion of selected models of interdisciplinary scholarship.  A packet of materials will be made available to workshop participants well in advance.  During the summer months, participants will work independently, in consultation with one of the faculty instructors, to prepare a draft prospectus.  In the second session, participants will read and discuss the prospectus drafts. Selected participants are expected to participate in all three facets of the summer program: the two framing workshop sessions as well as the independent summer writing project.

Award

Selected participants will receive a $500 stipend for their full participation in the program and will be named American Studies Fellows.

Applications

Eligibility
Workshop participants must have completed all graduate-level course work by the end of the 2007-08 academic year and must have completed or be well advanced in the preparation of their doctoral qualifying exams.

Deadline
April 16, 2008

Instructions
There are two steps in the application process.
1. Complete a short survey to indicate your interest in the program. You may access the survey here: https://catalysttools.washington.edu/webq/survey/uwch/49052

2. Submit a 750-1000 word dissertation project description, short bibliography (2 pages maximum), and a curriculum vita via a Catalyst Collect It dropbox. You may access the dropbox here: https://catalysttools.washington.edu/collectit/dropbox/uwch/1714

Both steps of this process must be completed in order to be considered for the American Studies dissertation fellowship workshop.

Assistance using Catalyst Collect It tools is available on the Catalyst Website.

Notifications
Award decisions will be made and applicants informed by May 7, 2008.

Questions

For questions regarding the content of projects and the workshops, please contact the faculty directly via email (below).  For administrative questions regarding applications or awards, please call the Simpson Center at 543-3920.

Faculty

Eva Cherniavsky is Hilen Professor of English at the University of Washington, where she teaches and publishes in the areas of American Studies, postcolonial studies, feminism, U.S. literatures, film, and television. She is author of Incorporations: Race, Nation, and the Body Politics Of Capital (2006) and That Pale Mother Rising: Sentimental Discourses and the Imitation of Motherhood in Nineteenth-Century America (1995). Her current research projects center on transformations in citizenship in the context of wider transformations in the nation-state and global capital, and on the proliferation of American Studies programs in the former Soviet bloc. Email: ec22@u.washington.edu

Nikhil Pal Singh is Walker Family Endowed Professor and Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Washington, where he teaches and publishes in the areas of civil rights and social movements, U.S. and African-American history, and theories of race, ethnicity, and nationalism.  He is author of Black is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (2004)and the forthcoming edited collection of essays and interviews, When This Time is Named: Jack O’Dell and the Black Freedom Movement (2008). He is currently working on a book project tentatively entitled The Afterlife of Fascism. Email: nsingh@u.washington.edu