During the academic years 2022–24, the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies will focus on the topic of “Environment and Climate.”
Changing awareness—and alarm—about human civilization’s impact on the environment and climate has shaped a dynamic field of historical writing. In 2022-24, the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University seeks applications from scholars working on questions related to environment and climate in an historical framework, in any period of human history, and all geographical areas. We welcome projects that explore the mutual influence of social and physical environments, including projects that foreground the role of the environment in shaping human societies and those that highlight the role of humans in changing climatic and environmental conditions. Particular themes may include (but are not limited to) the role of technology, migration, agriculture, justice, health, colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, political ideology, war, law, frontiers, property regimes, demographics, natural disasters, conservation and sustainability movements, aesthetic conceptions of natural and built landscapes, and the intellectual history of issues of environment and climate. We are particularly interested in projects that explore the intersection between histories of the environment and climate on the one hand, and histories of race, gender, and/or inequality on the other.
The Davis Center offers fellowships for either one semester (September-December or February-June) or the academic year. Though the Center is normally able to offer fellowship support for only a single semester, it welcomes the residence of year-long Fellows who combine Center support with funds from elsewhere. Applicants are encouraged to apply for external funds or sabbatical support, and to apply for a year’s Fellowship if they have a reasonable expectation of bringing additional funds with them.
Center fellowships are residential. Fellows are required to live in Princeton in order to take an active part in the exchange of ideas with Fellows and others in the university community.
The most important intellectual forum of the Center is the weekly Davis Seminar, which meets on Friday mornings during the fall and spring term for lively and wide-ranging discussion of work by invited outside scholars and by the Fellows themselves. Fellows are expected to attend the weekly Seminar and to present a paper from their ongoing projects at one of its sessions. It is the core seminar of the History Department, attended not only by Fellows but also by faculty from History and other departments at Princeton, graduate students, members of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, faculty from nearby universities, and others.
Fellowships are awarded to employed scholars who are expected to return to their position.