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Please see the complete list of HRC fellowships on the right side of this page.

Fellowships

Individual Research Fellowships for Rice Faculty

The Humanities Research Center awards up to three teaching-release fellowships to Rice faculty each academic year, and to date has awarded a total of sixty-four.  The fellowships are meant to facilitate the completion of a single-author book-length project or the initiation of a new project, in order to help faculty in the development of their careers. Fellows are released from teaching for one semester to pursue their research projects. 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.

2008-09 Individual Research Fellows

Marcia Citron Marcia Citron, Spring 2009
Martha and Henry Malcolm Lovett Distinguished Service Professor of Musicology. “When Opera Meets Film.” Dr. Citron will complete her second book on the aesthetics of opera and visual media. Consisting of case studies, the book covers both opera-film and mainstream film and focuses on aesthetics, subjectivity and desire as ways of analyzing how characters and viewers interact with operatic music. The book will provide insights into the cultural role of opera in an environment that is increasingly challenging for classical music.
Leo Costello

Leo Costello, Spring 2009
Assistant Professor of Art History. “J.M.W. Turner and the Subject of History.” Dr. Costello completing a project relating the aesthetic achievements of the nineteenth-century British painter to politics, economics and intellectual history. His book will yield a multidisciplinary account of the life and work of J.M.W. Turner and of early nineteenth-century Britain’s ability to conceive and represent itself in a time of unprecedented historical change. The book will shows that Tuner’s work elaborates the changing notions of individual subjectivity in an age of developing and fragmenting nationhood.

Julie Fette Julie Fette, Fall 2008
Assistant Professor of French Studies. “Professional Prejudice: Xenophobia in Medicine and Law in Interwar France.” Dr. Fette is completing a social history of exclusion in the legal and medical professions in interwar France and during the Vichy era. The book project is situated at the intersection of scholarship on xenophobia, nationalism and immigration, and enters into the debate over the continuities and ruptures between the authoritarian Vichy regime and the democratic French Republics that came before and after. Dr. Fette’s book will also contribute to the academic debate over the relationship between xenophobia and anti-Semitism.


Call for 2009-2010 Individual 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 project within its specific discipline, as well as its potential impact on humanistic practice, broadly construed.
  • The appropriateness of the research methods, and the exigency of the research questions raised in the project.
  • The prospects for publication, product, or outcome, 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: Individual 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 and significance of the project, including its impact on larger scholarly communities.
    • include a brief history of prior research or planning, past support, and future plans for the project.
    • describe the scope and resource materials of the research, the main issues to be addressed, and the relationship of the research to other published and ongoing work in the field.
  • 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.

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