2020-2021 Humanities Institute Public Humanities Fellowship for Graduate Students
In Partnership with Humanities New York
NEW!Fellowship Information Session on Wed., February 5, 2020 from 1-2:20pm, Rm 1008 Humanities,for interested applicants to talk about how to strengthen your application. Refreshments will be served.
The Humanities Institute at Stony Brook (HISB) and Humanities New York announce the call for applicants for the 2019-2020 Public Humanities Fellowship.
Stony Brook University Fellows will be part of a cohort from these eight other New York universities: The City University of New York Graduate Center, Columbia University, Cornell University, New York University, SUNY Buffalo, SUNY Binghamton, the University of Rochester or Syracuse University.
ELIGIBILITY: Applicants must be residents of New York State and enrolled as a graduate student in a humanities discipline, broadly defined, at one of these nine universities: The City University of New York Graduate Center, Columbia University, Cornell University, New York University, SUNY Buffalo, Stony Brook University, SUNY Binghamton, the University of Rochester or Syracuse University
DURATION & STIPEND: Duration of the Fellowship is August 2019 to June 2020, including mandatory attendance at a two-day orientation on August 17-18, 2020 in New York City and subsequent workshops. The Fellowship stipend is $8,000, plus a $500 travel and research stipend. The Fellowship is supported by a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
The Public Humanities Fellowship was developed by Humanities New York in partnership with nine New York research universities to bring humanities scholarship into the public realm, encourage emerging humanities scholars to conceive of their work in relation to the public sphere, develop scholars’ skills for doing public work, and strengthen the public humanities community in New York State. The year-long Fellowship will involve a combination of training in the methods and approaches of the public humanities and work by the Fellow to develop a public project related to their own scholarship in partnership with a community organization.
The skills and experiences afforded by the Fellowship are intended to serve scholars who have a record of working with the public as well as those who are starting to explore the public humanities. It is equally valuable for scholars who plan to pursue careers within the academy and those who plan to pursue other career paths.
FELLOWSHIP REQUIREMENTS:
- The Fellow is required to attend a two-day orientation run by Humanities New York at their New York City office on Monday, August 17 and Tuesday, August 18, 2019.
- During the Fellowship year, the Fellow will develop a plan to implement a public humanities project and work with community partners on that project.
- The Fellow will participate in workshops scheduled for December 2020 and June 2021.
- The Fellow will present the outcomes of their research and public work to the university community in coordination with HISB and submit a final report to Humanities New York.
- The Fellow must have a presence at HISB during the fellowship year, i.e., regularly attend HISB events and participate in Public Humanities forums/information sessions at HISB. Fellows will also meet regularly at HISB to discuss their reserach.
During the course of the Fellowship, Fellows will have the opportunity to participate in events sponsored by Humanities New York. Fellows are also eligible for project funds from HNY to support public programs developed during the course of their Fellowship. Throughout the Fellowship, Fellows are encouraged to work collaboratively with HNY to identify community partners, explore public humanities methods and programs, and share findings as their research progresses.
HISB Fellows will be part of a cohort from these eight other New York universities: The City University of New York Graduate Center, Columbia University, Cornell University, New York University, SUNY Buffalo, SUNY Binghamton, the University of Rochester, and Syracuse University.
ELIGIBILITY: Applicants must be residents of New York State and enrolled as a graduate student in a humanities discipline, broadly defined, at one of these nine universities: The City University of New York Graduate Center, Columbia University, Cornell University, New York University, SUNY Buffalo, Stony Brook University, SUNY Binghamton, the University of Rochester, or Syracuse University. Interested applicants should contact their university’s humanities center for other, university-specific, requirements.
TO APPLY: Interested applicants should submit an online application, including a resume/CV and two references, by Monday, February 17, 2020. The online application can be accessed through Humanities New York’s program management platform, found here: https://humanitiesny.fluxx.io. Applicants will need to create an account in the system, even if they’ve applied in prior years.
Applicants will be notified of final decisions by Friday, April 17, 2020.
CONTACT: Humanities New York Program Officer Adam Capitanio (212-233-1131 / (acapitanio@nyhumanitiesny.org)
HUMANITIES NEW YORK: The mission of Humanities New York (formally known as the New York Council for the Humanities) is to help all New Yorkers become thoughtful participants in our communities by promoting critical inquiry, cultural understanding, and civic engagement. Founded in 1975, the New York Council for the Humanities is the sole statewide proponent of public access to the humanities. Humanities New York is a private 501(c)3 that receives Federal, State, and private funding.
To download pdf of guidelines, click here.
The 2019-2020 HISB Public Humanities Fellows:
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Meghan Buckley is a PhD candidate in English and American literature at Stony Brook University. Her research interests include 20th and 21st century American and Anglophone literature with a focus on veterans studies, trauma theory, and war literature. She is currently at work on her dissertation, which examines the function of landscape in contemporary literature of the Iraq War. Lecture: POSTPONED "Combat Silence: Narrating the Female Veteran Experience" Combat Silence is an initiative, in conjunction with the Herstory Writers Workshop of Long Island, that explores and gives voice to the female veteran experience through memoir. In the fall of 2019, students in EGL 320 “The Literature of War” embarked on an experiential learning process using the Herstory methodology to write about the experience of war side by side with female veterans. This talk will discuss the logistics of the workshop, its strengths and challenges, as well as plans for implementing this initiative into the English department in future semesters. |
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Andrew Rimby is a Ph.D. Candidate in the English department at SBU. His dissertation, “The Pool of Narcissus: Transatlantic Homoerotic Attachments (1837-1901), argues that Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, and other 19th-century writers use ancient Greek allusions to express male homoerotic desire before the term “homosexuality” is invented. He is a 2019 Guiliano Global Fellow, a 2019-2020 Public Humanities Fellow, and a 2019 Stony Brook Graduate Fellow in the Arts, Humanities, and Lettered Social Sciences. Zoom Lecture: "Whitman’s Multitudes: From Interactive Module to Interactive Kiosk" This talk explores the two phases of the “Whitman’s Multitudes” project. The first phase involved creating Whitman poetry lesson plans for middle and high school students with the English Education program. The second phase involved sifting through the students’ final projects to see what material could be used for the Whitman Birthplace’s interactive kiosks which will premiere in Summer 2020. This project emphasizes why multiple institutions (Stony Brook University, local middle and high schools, and the Whitman Birthplace) need to be involved when creating an interactive museum exhibit. |
The 2018-2019 HISB Public Humanities Fellows:
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Rachel Corbman is a doctoral candidate in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Stony Brook University. She is currently a Mellon predoctoral fellow in women's history at the New-York Historical Society, and a public humanities fellow at Humanities New York. Her dissertation, "Conferencing on the Edge: A Queer History of Feminist Field Formation, 1969-89," is a history of the acrimonious feminist conflicts that shaped women's studies and gay and lesbian studies in the 1970s and 1980s. "Conferencing on the Edge" won the CLAGS fellowship award for a dissertation, first book, or second book in LGBTQ Studies, and portions of this project have been published (or are forthcoming) in Feminist Formations and GLQ. Lecture: "The Wide World of Lesbian Cats, 1970-today" This project traces the history of lesbian feminist print and digital cultures through visual representations of cats. This exhibit is based on archival research at the Lesbian Herstory Archives, and will open at the LGBT Center in New York City in July 2019. |
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Stephen J. Pallas is a PhD candidate in English at Stony Brook University. He researches British Romanticism, aesthetics, ecocriticism, and rhetoric. He has presented and published papers that consider the intersections of poetry and poetics, environmental rights, and political activism. His dissertation considers British Romantic poetry and theories of empathy in the context of poverty, slavery, gender inequality, disabilities, and environmental degradation. He also runs a non-profit organization, Sound Off!. Lecture: "Sound Off!: Workshopping the d/Deaf Experience"1970-today" Sound Off! is a nonprofit organization dedicated to raising scholarship funds for d/Deaf students enrolled in or applying to arts and humanities programs. The first events the organization has sponsored is a series of workshops in painting, prose, and poetry. The events will culminate in a special issue of literature published by The Long Island Literary Journal. This talk explores some of the challenges that occurred in the development of this project, how these obstacles were overcome, and plans for the organization’s future. |
The 2017-2018 HISB Public Humanities Fellows:
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Javier Gaston-Greenberg is a doctoral candidate in Hispanic Languages and Literature. His dissertation will focus on the construction and crisis of hero mythologies in Cuba through comics. Her also leads professional development workshops for the Internationals Network for Public Schools and is a Clinical Supervisor at the Department of Curriculum & Teaching, Hunter College CUNY. Lecture: "Hero Gensis: The Secret Language of Comics for Immigrant Youth" The Public Humanities Fellowship has enabled Javier Gastón-Greenberg to develop and implement a project called "Hero Genesis" -- a high school curricula that employs comic book culture and its secret language to discover the hidden powers inhabiting immigrant youth in New York City. Its’ purpose is to channel youth expression through professional development workshops for educators and in-school responsive curricula that harnesses multimodal comic-themed medias to generate original hero stories. |
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Allyse Knox-Russell is a PhD candidate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Stony Brook. Her dissertation
project explores the ways that gender, race, and indigeneity influence embodied experiences
of land and place. Her public humanities project aims to develop an environmental
health justice curriculum for schools and summer camps. Lecture: "Interdisciplinary Obstacles: Teaching Environmental Justice K-12" Students at all levels need the tools provided by both the humanities and sciences to imagine just solutions to ongoing ecological crises. Yet, interdisciplinarity remains a challenge for both university and K-12 educators. How can we help youth make the connections they require to work towards a more livable world? |
The 2016-2017 HISB Public Humanities Fellows:
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Eva Boodman is a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy at Stony Brook University working on ethics, social and political philosophy, feminist philosophy, decolonial philosophy, and the philosophy of race. Her dissertation, Structural Ignorance, confronts the issue of ethical and political responsibility for group forms of ignorance. She uses white ignorance as a paradigm case to discuss the ways that dominant, often oppressive norms can be reproduced in the very attempt to escape them. With her public humanities fellowship, she will develop and teach relevant, responsive curricula to be taught at the women's jail on Rikers Island, and will recruit and organize Stony Brook academics. Lecture: "Wrestling with Knowledge and Power on Rikers Island" Education is not politically neutral. There is an ongoing discussion in philosophy and social science about how implicit norms and racial biases operate in knowledge production, and how these are inseparable from power structures. This talk discusses how structural racism operates through the norms at work in educational institutions, and uses that framework to discuss the ethical and political complexities of teaching philosophy on Rikers Island. |
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Francisco Delgado is a Ph.D. candidate in English at Stony Brook University, where he is also a W. Burghardt Turner Fellow. His dissertation examines contemporary literature by Asian American authors and Native American authors who use the dystopian genre to address capitalist exploitation, environmental rights, and racial injustice. He holds a B.A. from SUNY New Paltz and an M.A. from Brooklyn College. An enrolled member of the Tonawanda Band of Seneca Indian tribe of upstate New York, he proposes a project that will construct an interactive website to teach and promote the Seneca language and culture. Lecture: "Nya:wëh sgë:nö’: Revitalizing the Seneca Indian Language" The Seneca language, like many Native languages, is nearing extinction. In this talk, Delgado explores the circumstances that led to this current state of the language before detailing efforts, including his own through the construction of a multimodal website, aimed at preserving the language and culture going forward. |
The 2015-2016 HISB Public Humanities Fellows:
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Allison Tyndall is a doctoral candidate in English literature at Stony Brook University. Her dissertation
examines the political role of the common people in 16th- and 17th-century history
plays. She holds a B.A. from the University of Toledo and an M.A. from DePaul University.
Allison returned to school to pursue her Ph.D. after working for six years in service-learning
programs in Chicago and Ohio, including a year of service with AmeriCorps VISTA.
As a Public Humanities Fellow, she will engage university students in developing ESL
resources to supplement Shakespearean plays for a high school in the Bronx.
Lecture: “The Human Experience and King Lear: Community within and without the Text”
Tuesday, April 5, 2016 at 4:00pm 1008 Humanities In Shakespeare's famous staging of human suffering, the way people connect to one another is fundamentally redefined after traditional systems of order break down. Tyndall discusses this reading of community in King Lear and her experiment using the text to connect her Introduction to Drama students to a high school for English Language Learners in the Bronx. |
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Alena Sauzade is a doctoral candidate at Stony Brook University specializing in public art and commemoration. Her research focuses on government and community sponsored monuments as well as intentional and unintentional memorials in order to interrogate the various ways that memory functions in the public sphere. Her dissertation, Witnesses to Terror: Nationhood and Trauma in Memorials to Victims of Terrorism, focuses on memorials to victims of the September 11th, 2001 attacks in the United States and worldwide. It considers September 11th as a cultural trauma, and explores how the artifacts of the attacks, including World Trade Center steel and Pentagon limestone, have become important symbolic components in the composition of official and vernacular memorials. Alena’s public humanities project will generate an archived community dialogue on 9/11 memorials. Lecture: "Beyond 'Reflecting Absence,' Long Island Communities and the Commemoration
of 9/11" In this talk, Sauzade will chronicle the history 9/11 memorials around Long Island, focusing on how their shared formal characteristics and reoccurring visual and symbolic elements present a collective memory of the attacks that challenges the representation of psychological trauma presented by New York City’s national memorial, “Reflecting Absence.” |
See the full list of the current Humanities New York Graduate Public Humanities Fellows here.