Assisted by the generosity of the Mellon Foundation, which is funding the first two years of this Fellowship, King’s College Cambridge is able to invite applications for a four-year Junior Research Fellowship from those who are completing or have recently completed a doctorate and who intend to pursue a research project on some aspect of the study of prejudice.

Because of the appalling consequences of racial prejudice, on the one hand, and because of the deep-seated nature of prejudices based on sexuality and gender, on the other, prejudice as such has gone largely unexamined. But when does the discrimination involved in proper judgement become socially and morally deleterious prejudice? Neither the full range of the operation of prejudice nor the consequences of drawing the line between proper judgement and improper prejudice are properly understood, either in theory or practice. Education and cultural life depend upon discrimination, and classification is an essential, if also problematic, part of coming to know the world. Yet discrimination and classification are the tools too of corrosive social, political, and intellectual prejudice.

This call for applications is open to investigations of prejudice as such, as a philosophical, political, or sociological concept, to investigations of the operation of prejudice in all branches of life and learning in the past and the present, and to investigations of the consequences of prejudice, historical or contemporary.

This post-doctoral Fellowship is intended to encourage research into prejudice by enabling the successful candidate to complete a substantial research project on their chosen aspect of prejudice in the context of any Arts, Humanities or Social Science discipline, broadly conceived: viz. anthropology, archaeology, architecture, classics, criminology, economics, English and other literatures, history, the history of art, the history of science, law, linguistics, musicology, philosophy,  psychology, sociology, theology.

The ideal candidate for this Junior Research Fellowship will have a strong background in one or more disciplines within the Arts, Humanities, or Social Sciences and have completed an outstanding doctoral thesis. It is not a requirement that the candidate’s doctoral studies or the work that they submit in support of their application should have concerned questions of prejudice, but candidates will be expected to show in their applications both how their future work relates to the work that they have already done, and to explain clearly how their proposed project relates to existing studies on prejudice. The successful candidate will be expected to engage broadly with the whole college community and to organise academic activities in the form of seminars/workshops/conferences (for which the College is able to provide modest funding).