Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies Residency Research Grant Call for Applications
Terms of the Grant: Scholars at all ranks may apply for a residency research grant for one semester or for the full academic year. These grants are supplementary and presume scholars have sabbatical or other means of support. For those within driving distance of Ann Arbor, grants may be combined with a regular teaching position and can be used to defray the costs of travel to and from Ann Arbor for Institute events. These awards carry a travel and research allowance of $5,000 per semester for a maximum of $10,000 for the academic year.* The grant also includes library privileges, work space, and the expectation of regular participation in bi-weekly Institute seminars and colloquia. Applicants for the Residency Research Grants should explain briefly how their work might fit with our theme (description below). For further information on the Institute, please visit our website: www.lsa.umich.edu/eihs.
Theme for 2010-2011: Paucity & Plenty, Enactments & Expectations.
As the global collapse of financial markets draws our attention to the stark contrasts between paucity and plenty across the world, it also renders visible the extent to which human actions, perceptions, and expectations shape these conditions. With this theme we aim to historicize scarcity and abundance, and to problematize their diverse historical expressions: economic, environmental, spatial, temporal, legal, social, cultural, and spiritual. We reconsider the tensions of poverty, deprivation, wealth, and excess—the preoccupations of an older economic and social history—aided by the questions, methods, and insights of the cultural and transnational historiographic turns. This theme presents an opportunity to explore new approaches to familiar historical questions, widening the terms of abundance and scarcity to encompass an examination of changing forms of material and immaterial production, environmental scarcity and engagement, disasters of famine and drought, and crises of bodies, health and medicine, along with the forms of social inequality and social movements they have produced. The study of paucity and plenty can be pursued at different scales: within intimate domains, inside states or nations, or across larger geographically dispersed networks, including new forms of empire—each with its own unequal relations and distributions of resources, goods, value, and practices. This theme also offers occasion to contemplate the role of the imaginary and the performative: displays of difference in wealth and status, the enactment of sumptuary laws, the meanings of decadence and indulgence, consumption and waste, specters of futures and pasts, and the enforcement of regimes of paucity within cultures of plenty.
Applications for 2010-11 must be submitted electronically by 8 March 2010 to eisenberginstitute@umich.edu. Selected recipients will be notified by 1 April 2010.
Applications should include:
• a letter explaining your interest in the Residency Research Grant. Please indicate clearly the period for which you are applying for residency – fall semester, winter semester or the full academic year.
• a research statement of 500-750 words.
• a short CV.
Questions may be directed to Ron Suny, Director or Shannon Rolston, Program Coordinator.
*Please note that this income is taxable.
Contact Info:
Electronic applications accepted only on or before 8 March 2010 at:
eisenberginstitute@umich.edu
Further Information:
http://www.lsa.umich.edu/eihs
