The American Communities Program, 2022-23
Call for Fellowship Proposals
Time
The ACP theme will be in effect for two consecutive years, from 2022-24, which will enable faculty to plan ahead for fellowship applications as well as collaborate with the ACP on programming and curricular initiatives. The deadline for fellowship applications for 2022-23 is Friday, April 29, 2022 @ 5pm.
Submission guidelines are at the end of the announcement.
Through our theme, we offer an opportunity to test, question, and reimagine our ways of conceptualizing and experiencing time. We seek original research proposals that analyze, in some way, issues of time and temporality and the unique ways in which they are represented in humanities-based inquiry. We especially encourage submissions that interrogate and theorize the theme and do not take it as a face-value starting point; we invite faculty to interpret the theme broadly.
Questions we may ask include, but are not limited to, the following:
- How do we theorize ideas such as time, temporality, memory, and history? How do these terms intersect and diverge?
- How do different bodies experience time differently? How can we theorize, for example, racialized and/or gendered time?
- How do our understanding and metaphors of time (as progression, flow, linearity, discrete units, coordinates, scarcity, etc.) inform our theoretical frameworks in particular and the very nature of our humanistic and/or scientific inquiries in general?
- How are various ways of experiencing time represented aesthetically and formally, including in terms of narrative structure?
- How do artists thematically and formally accelerate and/or protract time and to what effects?
- How are conceptualizations of time connected to work, labor, and leisure?
- How is thinking about the cultural, political, and economic ramifications of phenomena such as lingering, promising and fulfillment, waiting and deferral, productivity, cycles of nature, endurance and ephemerality, cause and effect, haunting, transformation, speculation, standardization of time, time tables and schedules, trade, and clocks and calendars impacted by how we theorize and experience time?
- How can recent thinking in the sciences and quantum physics inform temporal studies in the humanities?
- How are remembering, forgetting, and memorialization enacted and represented and to what effects?
- What material and imaginative conditions are required to manifest alternate futures?
- What can happen when we unsettle a linear chronology of past, present, and future?
- What are the ways and to what effects do bodies act out of time or disrupt time through sleep, unconsciousness, time travel, or other means?
Tenured and tenure-track faculty at Cal State LA are invited to submit proposals for two different fellowship programs: 1) ACP Working Group Fellowships (working groups may include graduate and advanced undergraduate students) and 2) ACP Individual Fellowships.
Interdisciplinary Working Group Fellowships
The ACP seeks to strengthen the humanities by bringing together colleagues and students from across campus for discussion and critical analyses of important issues in public and intellectual life. These fellowships seek to nurture and inspire our scholarly/pedagogical/creative/civic engagement activities in the humanities through the exploration of shared interests, themes, methodologies, and/or projects. To this end, the ACP continues the IWG fellowships, which award up to $500 to fund informal, interdisciplinary working groups in the humanities. A tenured or tenure-track faculty member must be the primary organizer, but working groups may include graduate and advanced undergraduate students. Money may be used to support a reading/writing group; to fund working lunches, workshops, meetings, or off-campus fieldtrips; or to pay for other relevant expenses. If your working group is especially fruitful and leads to further plans and projects, additional funding may be available.
To apply: Send a letter of interest explaining 1) the theme of your working group and a description of the issues and questions involved, 2) the name of the primary organizer of the group and a list of members and their affiliations, and 3) a description of the kinds of activities you expect your group to undertake with a list of itemized, anticipated costs.
Working Group Requirements:
- Groups must meet at least three times during the academic year.
- Funds must be spent on joint activities. This program is meant to support collegial activities of faculty members and students engaged in advanced work.
- Funds must be spent and receipts submitted by May 1 of the academic year awarded.
- The working group organizer is responsible for the management of these funds.
- By May 10 of the year awarded, the organizer will submit a report of the group’s activities to the director of the ACP.
Individual Fellowships
Preference will be given to proposals that best demonstrate a nuanced engagement with and interrogation of the theme in innovative and meaningful ways. One of the fellowships, the Bailey Fellowship, may be awarded to an original project that applies this year's research theme to African American communities and/or individuals and preferably involves archival materials.
The program welcomes proposals from the arts that can be presented in a lecture/recital. All proposals, however, must include a research or analytical component based in the humanities. Each fellowship awards 3 units of reassigned time and may include a $500 stipend for a student assistant or other project-related expenses.
Application materials consist of a two-page curriculum vitae, a 500-word research proposal, and a projected budget for research-related expenditures (up to $500 may be awarded). Proposals should explain the relevance of the proposed project to this year's research theme and the originality and significance of the research. Fellows must present their research at the ACP's Spring 2023 symposium.
Application Materials
Please submit an electronic copy of your application with ACP FELLOWSHIP
APPLICATION in the subject line to
Dr. Maria Karafilis
[email protected]
Joseph A. Bailey II, M.D. Endowed Chair of American Communities
Director, CAL STATE LA/NEH American Communities Program
The submission deadline for 2022-23 fellowship applications is Friday, April 29, 2022 @ 5pm.