The A.W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship Program at UW-Madison is an interdisciplinary program providing postdoctoral fellowships in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, it provides two-year postdoctoral fellowships for recent PhD recipients.
The program, established in 2010, builds upon interdisciplinary initiatives on campus exploring the broad question, “What is human?” These initiatives have been examining the transnational circulations of culture and power on a global landscape, questions of biocultures and biopolitics, and new ways of thinking about media in the context of the digital revolution.
The A.W. Mellon Postdoctoral Program is affiliated with the Center for the Humanities and the Institute for Research in the Humanities. A.W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellows are members of the Institute for Research in the Humanities and are also affiliated with a humanities or humanistic social science department in the College of Letters & Science, where they will teach a total of three courses over two years with no teaching in the first semester of the fellowship.
2016–2017 Theme: Climates and Natures
We seek applications from scholars whose research addresses the conceptions, representations, experiences, and transformations of the earth and its regions – that is, work that reflects the environmental humanities, broadly conceived. How does a changing earth – past, present, or future – affect and become affected by society, culture, politics, and arts? Projects may focus on any area of the world, including cross-regional analyses, at any historical or pre-historical moment. They can treat human or nonhuman experiences and conditions, affirmative or destructive, anthropocentric or non-anthropocentric. Potential topics of interest include, but are not limited to health, agriculture, vitality, heat, isolation, drought, flood, scarcity, waste, justice, migration, extinction, pollution, and extremity. Projects that connect literal and metaphoric meanings of climates and natures are also eligible.
We welcome applications from scholars who work in aesthetics, philosophy, cultural studies, history of science, medicine, environment, or technology, critical and political theory, critical race studies, linguistics, film and media studies, gender studies, and other core and emerging fields in the humanities. Interdisciplinary scope across these fields or between the humanities, arts, sciences, and social sciences, and projects that apply innovative methods, are especially encouraged.