CFA: 2022-2023

CCHS Bingham Faculty Fellowships

Jingshuo Yang, Struggle, ink and watercolor on silk, 39” x 38”, 2020, Hite Art Institute MFA 2022

Trauma, Precarity, and Resilience

Application Deadline: Monday, December 13, 2021

The Commonwealth Center for Humanities and Society develops an annual theme that provides the foundation for the academic year’s scheduled events and for the Faculty Fellows program. The theme for the 2022-2023 academic year will be Trauma, Precarity, and Resilience.

The past few years have once again highlighted the intersectional nature of longstanding trends, such as racial discrimination, economic disparity, climate change, gender inequity, and health discrepancies, to name but a few. These conditions raise questions:

• about the materialization and consequences of cultural amnesia/denial;
• about embodied ways of persevering evident in material culture and artistic expression;
• about the resurgence of local community building practices as well as the intersecting forces that give rise to a global precariat class;
• about the current manifestations and the historical, cultural, and structural factors anchoring people, practices, and institutions in place;
• about not only the psychological and bodily harms that are caused by the systemic injustices that define our existence but also about the coping mechanisms that we willingly or unwillingly cultivate in the face of such injustices;
• about the natural and built environments that are simultaneously entangled by and entangling us.

What, then, can we learn as we attend to individual and community trauma, precarity, and/or resilience?

For 2022-2023, the Commonwealth Center for Humanities and Society invites applications for up to six CCHS Internal Faculty Fellows to address these and related questions. We will focus on the linked terms “trauma,” “precarity,” and “resilience” (though you need not be working on each of these terms) as these allow for a breadth of responses. Theoretical, empirical, historical, sociocultural, and creative approaches to these concepts are all welcome.

• Fellows are required to be in residence during the academic year, to present one lecture or one workshop on their research, and to participate regularly in the bimonthly activities and organization of the Faculty Fellows Program while completing their own research projects.
• Fellows will play a role in shaping CCHS programming for the academic year, from inviting distinguished guest speakers to finding innovative ways to share scholarship with our arts and culture partners in the community.
• Fellows may participate in a shared Faculty Fellow project that circulates their ideas within and beyond the academy.
• Fellows will receive one course release.
• Fellows will receive a supplemental research/travel stipend from CCHS estimated at $1,500 (pre-tax).

Applications are due Monday, December 13th, 2021, and require a current CV, a proposal of up to 1,000 words describing the project to be pursued while a Fellow, and a brief letter of support from the faculty member’s department chairperson that guarantees the one course release and comments on the substance of the application.

• Please email all materials to the CCHS Project Coordinator, Brandon Harwood, brandon.harwood@louisville.edu. Fellows will be appointed by the Dean, as recommended by the CCHS Advisory Board, and will be named in January 2022.
• CCHS seeks to create an intellectually diverse group of faculty fellows who will benefit from conducting their research in a multidisciplinary setting. Fellowships are open to all tenured and tenure-track A&S faculty engaged in humanistic scholarship. CCHS Advisory Board members are not eligible to apply. The CCHS theme provides the rubric for the Faculty Fellows. It is expected that Fellows will position themselves to contribute substantively to scholarly discussion of the theme.
• The Faculty Fellows meetings will be held twice monthly on the second and fourth Friday (typically at 12:00) and run as a colloquium.