2009-2010 Student Fellowship
All members of the junior class are invited to apply for a semester-long Student Fellowship at the Center for the Humanities during the 2009-10 academic year. Wesleyan's is among the first such university humanities centers established and serves to bring together Wesleyan faculty, students and visiting scholars for extended exploration of selected subjects. Our 2009-10 theme, "War", will entice us to think deeply about the realities and meanings of war, to examine its social and metaphoric forms as well as its visceral ones.
Four Student Fellowships are awarded by the Center's Advisory Board for each semester. Student Fellows share an office at the Center and take part in Center activities and in the vibrant intellectual community these activities produce. Among these events are the Center's Monday lecture series; colloquial discussions on Tuesday mornings, 10:30-12:00; Tuesday luncheons with guest lecturers; and occasional Center conferences. One course credit is awarded for a Student Fellow's participation in the Center's activities.
Every applicant for a Student Fellowship must be planning to do a senior project (an honors thesis or an essay) on a topic related to the Center theme for the year. The project need not be underway at the time of the application. The theme, "War", is broadly construed and connects with projects and problems across the disciplines. Faculty Fellows who will work at the Center during fall semester are Professors Chenoweth (Government), Nakamura (Asian Languages and Literatures, East Asian Studies), Schatz (History), and Swinehart (History). Faculty Fellows who will work at the Center during the spring semester are Professors Moon (Government), Potter (History), Rider (Romance Languages and Literatures), and Rutland (Government). There will also be a group of visiting Research Fellows and Postdoctoral Fellows.
If you would like to learn more about the student fellowships, please come to an Open House at 4:00 p.m. on Tuesday, March 3 in the Center Lounge, 95 Pearl Street. Some of our current Student Fellows will be there with me to answer your questions.
Applications for student fellowships are due at the Center by Wednesday, April 1. Applications should include:
1. The cover sheet - please click here.
2. The application - please click here.
3. A proposal (no more than two pages) for a senior project (an honors thesis or an essay) to be carried out during the fellowship, indicating its relevance to the theme "War" described in detail below.
4. Two letters of recommendation (sent directly to the Center) from faculty members.
We will let you know of the Center Advisory Board’s decision by April 24. If you have any questions, please call the Center at extension 685-3044.
Center for the Humanities,
Wesleyan University:
Semester Theme, 2009 - 2010
"War"
Wars bring brutality, death, upheaval, and trauma. Participants and survivors bear witness to the disruptions of war in concrete detail. Nothing is so urgently documented as war, and war-making itself is often organized with reverence and precision. Yet accounts of war struggle with the limits of their narrative grasp. How might we make sense of the very breakdown of meaning and order? Can war be understood, as commonly claimed, to be the continuation of politics by other means or is it more accurate to understand politics as the continuation of war by other means? By virtue of the vivid struggles bound up in our ordinary and literal understanding of combat, war inevitably becomes the ground for metaphorical extensions, and these in turn affect our understanding of war in its most visceral form. The interaction between concrete and symbolic dimensions of war is far from simple.
The Center for the Humanities invites scholars and visitors for 2009-2010 to shed light on the realities and meanings of war, and to explore whether and how these are changing. Is war paradoxically presented as a state of exception, yet one from which there is no exit? Has Kant's ideal of "perpetual peace" yielded to an ideology and reality of eternal war? What is the impact of bringing war home to civilian life, whether in the marketing of combat games and paraphernalia or in the involuntary re-enactments of post-traumatic stress disorder? How has war become a paradigm for political projects such as "wars" on terror, cancer, drugs, or poverty? How are cultural debates figured as social battles such as the war on the family or gender wars? What new responses to war are emerging in politics, theory, and religious and social movements?