With the support of the Mellon Foundation’s Sawyer Seminar program, the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA) at Stanford University seeks applications for a one-year Mellon Sawyer Postdoctoral Fellowship in Digital Humanities. The postdoctoral fellow will play a leading role in organizing, administering and participating in the Mellon Sawyer seminar entitled “The Data that Divides Us: Recalibrating Data Methods for New Knowledge Frameworks Across the Humanities.”
We seek recent humanities PhDs whose research operates at the intersection with a relevant data-based field, including, but not limited to, digital humanities, data science, computational linguistics or social science, or information science. In addition, the successful applicant’s interests will align with the Seminar’s goal of investigating how the latency of values involving gender, race, class or the medical normal are encoded into existing data sets and the methodologies that we use to analyze them. Preference will be given to candidates whose work intersects with one or more of the critical fault lines around which the seminar will foster a sustained interdisciplinary dialogue: data before and after the digital divide; the ongoing legacies of nineteenth-century conceptions of data; and the challenge posed by premodern conceptions of scale and individual realities to our contemporary methods of analyzing the distant past. Scholars in any relevant discipline and working on any time period are welcome to apply.
The postdoctoral fellow will work with the organizers to administer the seminar, in which they will also be a full participant. Primary responsibilities will be to conduct original research on a topic related to the seminar theme; to attend and participate in the seminar meetings and other activities; and to assist as needed with the coordination of events. The postdoctoral fellow will be hosted by CESTA and will be expected to be in residence at the University throughout the duration of their fellowship.
The Fellowship carries a twelve-month appointment beginning September 1, 2023.
Candidates must have completed all requirements for their doctoral degree after June 30, 2020 and before July 31, 2023.