CFA: 2023-2024

CCHS Bingham Faculty Fellowships

Image Credit: "Yeon Keith Kareem Thompson" (Hung at 69 in High) 2018 by EVPL, UofL Comparative Humanities PhD '27

Bodies and Embodiment

Application Deadline: Friday, January 13, 2023

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 Bingham Faculty Fellows program. The theme for the 2023-2024 academic year will be Bodies and Embodiment.

The past few years have highlighted how certain bodies matter; how our embodied awareness shapes how we understand ourselves, our environment, democracy, economy, health care, culture, joy, etc; and, how historical and cultural forces transform, elevate, or even erase certain types of bodies and/or embodiments. These assertations raise questions about what we learn as we attend to how bodies and embodiment are entangled in larger forces. Questions include but not limited to:

• What is it like to feel through your body? What are the boundaries of the body and how have understandings of these boundaries been historically and culturally shaped?

• What bodies matter? How are bodies erased or sacrificed? How do malleable social formations like gender, sexuality and race overlay understandings of embodiment? What are the psychological and bodily harms caused by systemic, cultural amnesia/denial surrounding the materializations of certain bodies?

• Who/what is entitled to count as a body: corporations? animals? humans? environments? What natural and built environments make clear some bodies matter, and some don’t?

• What are the current manifestations and the historical, cultural, and structural factors that anchor certain bodies in place? What does it mean to be a body under capitalism? In the medical system? In the prison pipeline? Whose bodies are under surveillance?

• What are the ways that people honor their bodies (body art, piercings, fashion)? How have these been used as forms of resistance by the colonized? How have these expressions been suppressed, encouraged, and/or enforced?

For 2023-2024, 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 “Bodies and Embodiment” (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 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 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 Friday, January 13th, 2023, 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, assures a teaching schedule that will not conflict with bi-monthly Friday meetings (12:00-1:00), 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 2023.
• 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 Bingham Faculty Fellows meetings will be held twice monthly at noon, typically on the second and fourth Friday, and run as a colloquium.