Please see the complete list of HRC fellowships on the right side of this page.
Collaborative Research Fellowships for Rice Faculty
The Humanities Research Center awards up to three teaching-release fellowships per year to Rice faculty to foster collaborative research initiatives and provide them the time and resources to write grants for new intellectual endeavors, sponsored or co-sponsored by the HRC. For example, fellows may develop proposals for major grants to the Rockefeller Foundation or Ford Foundation, or may apply for institutional programs like the Mellon Foundation's Sawyer Seminars. Collaboration can occur between Rice faculty or between Rice faculty and faculty from other institutions.
The fellows also participate in the intellectual life of the center by sharing research activities through active participation in a yearlong brown-bag series with other HRC Fellows.
Because many such grant-writing endeavors are multi-institutional and collaborative in nature, the HRC provides a collaborative research fund for fellows. The HRC also provides in-house grant-writing support as appropriate.
2008-09 Collaborative Research Fellow
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Marcia Brennan, Spring 2009
Associate Professor of Art History
"The Arts of Transformation: Museums and the Medical Humanities"
Brennan’s project promotes a collaborative partnership between Rice University’s Department of Art History, the Museum District, and the Texas Medical Center. Her work fosters integrative, transdisciplinary scholarship based on the conceptual intersections shared by these seemingly diverse communities, which span themes of embodiment, creativity, trauma, diagnosis, healing, reflection, and transformation. Brennan will organize the 2008-09 biennial Menil-Rice lecture series sponsored by the Department of Art History and the Menil Collection, featuring distinguished speakers on these same topics.
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| Photograph by Tommy LaVergne |
2007-2008 Collaborative Research Fellows
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Alexander X. Byrd,
Fall 20007
Assistant Professor of History
"Two Schools: Race and Society in the Urban South Since Brown"
Byrd initiated a study of the consequences in the urban south over the past forty years of Brown v Board of Education. Focusing on Sharpstown and Yates High Schools, Byrd organized a multiyear research seminar open to students and faculty at Houston area universities and to community leaders. In its first year, the seminar examined the larger course of urban development and education in the post-war south and benefited from the counsel of a host of community leaders and nationally recognized researchers. In its second year, the Two Schools project will begin collecting oral histories concerning Yates and Sharpstown high schools and their respective neighborhoods from the early 1960s. These stories will form the foundation of a physical and digital archive documenting the institutional life of these schools and their surroundings.
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Robert E. Englebretson, Spring 2008
Assistant Professor of Linguistics
"Grammatical Resources for Interactional Practices: A Cross-Linguistic Survey of Subject Ellipsis and Expression in Conversation"
In collaboration with Marja-Liisa Helasvuo (Department of Finnish, University of Turku, Finland), Englebretson will explore the relationship between language form and language function by means of a cross-linguistic investigation of subject expression and ellipsis as observed in corpora of naturally occurring conversational data from English, Finnish, and Colloquial Indonesian. His initiative brings together methodologies from Conversation Analysis and Discourse-Functional Linguistics. Two conversely-related questions inform the research: How do the grammatical resources of a particular language facilitate or constrain the options that speakers have for pursuing micro-level social actions in conversation? And, how do the micro-level social actions that speakers pursue in conversation in turn serve to shape and motivate the grammatical systems that have developed in particular languages? |
Call for 2009-2010 Collaborative Research Fellows
Deadline: October 8, 2008
Download application and cover sheet.
Tenured and tenure-track faculty members in the School of Humanities at Rice - and from departments in other schools in which the faculty member is engaged in humanistic research broadly, construed - are eligible to apply.
Committee and other obligations continue during the teaching-release period. Permissions for absences or travel must be obtained from the department chair and dean prior to accepting the fellowship.
Criteria for selection
- The intellectual significance of the initiative within its specific discipline, as well as its potential impact on humanistic practice, broadly construed.
- The appropriateness of collaborative and innovative methods and the exigency of the research questions raised in the initiative.
- The prospects for long-range intended outcomes of the project, and the quality and usefulness of the intended outcome(s).
Selection Process
Each proposal is evaluated by the HRC Faculty Advisory Panel, and an external reviewer. This committee takes its collegial responsibilities seriously. Its members will not serve as advocates for proposals from their own departments. Although members of the committee may know applicants by name or reputation, it is unlikely that they will have in-depth familiarity with an applicant’s work.
All application materials will be forwarded for review to a distinguished scholar outside Rice. Invited outside evaluations are anonymous, and because they will compare different proposals, their reviews will not be made available to applicants. Applicants will be notified early November.
Submit by hard copy
- Cover sheet, with signatures. If the applicant is not in the School of Humanities, or if the applicant is the chair of a department, the project should be endorsed by the dean of his or her school.
Submit the following materials by email attachment to hrc@rice.edu
(Subject: Collaborative Research Fellowship.) Hard copies also will be accepted.
- Curriculum vitae (limit 10 pages)
- 1000-word project proposal with one-page bibliography. Please double-space and use 12-point type. In language appropriate for a multi-disciplinary panel of non-specialist readers, the proposal should
- explain the nature, scope, and significance of the initiative, including its impact on larger scholarly communities.
- include a brief history of prior research or planning, past support, and future plans for the initiative.
- identify other participants in the collaboration, and explain their roles and qualifications.
- A letter of intent from the collaborative party.
- Two letters of reference from scholars outside the university, solicited by the applicant and sent directly to the HRC. (The center will not solicit outside letters.) The most effective letters show a detailed knowledge of the candidate’s past work and address directly both the importance of the proposed project and the candidate’s qualifications to pursue it. General praise is less helpful to the committee. Reference letters must be received at the center by the application deadline: consideration of letters received after that date cannot be guaranteed. Referees may send letters by email (subject: Individual Research Reference) or hard copy to the HRC Office.
In the event that a proposal is not funded, the candidate is welcome to resubmit an updated proposal in any subsequent year.
The collaborative fellowship program furthers the HRC's mission of fostering scholarly research and intellectual community in the humanities broadly understood; facilitating scholarly work between other areas of the university and the School of Humanities; and leading institutional change through partnerships with foundation, other centers, research institutions, and other universities. It coincides with the HRC's goal of stimulating innovative collaborative initiatives that have lasting impact on the University's intellectual life and that bring Rice Humanities to national attention.
