The UCLA Humanities Consortium
The Humanities Consortium is not currently offering any fellowships.
2004-2005: Nations and Identities: The Secularization Thesis
The Humanities Consortium of the University of California, Los Angeles, will appoint two Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellows for a one-year tenure beginning in the fall of 2004. Fellows must have earned their doctorates after September 1, 2001, and must have the doctorate in hand by September 1, 2004. The Fellowship provides a stipend of $35,000, plus health benefits. All Fellows are required to be in residence and to participate in the Consortium's Mellon Seminar and Conference. Fellows will also teach two courses, through relevant departments or programs, and will be expected to participate in the intellectual life of these programs. Fellows will also be affiliated with a research center in one of three historical periods: antiquity to 1600; 1600 to 1800; and 1800 to the present. These Fellowships will conclude a multi-year program devoted to the theme "Nations and Identities." The theme for 2004-2005 is: "Nations and Identities: The Secularization Thesis."
This year's seminar examines the viability of the standard secularization thesis for the discussion of national identity. The standard thesis suggests that the social importance of religion diminishes with modernization, that is, with the differentiation of social spheres (law, education, administration, art, health care, etc.), the integration of local communities into a larger social whole (e.g., via print and transportation), and the rationalization of thought fostered by technology. While the secularization thesis has been persuasively invoked by some theorists of the nation-state (such as Gellner), it has also been questioned both as a reliable account of the historical formation of national identities, and as a useful guide to the global religious tensions of the present day.
2003-2004: Minorities, Majorities, and the Question of Civil Society
The Humanities Consortium of the University of California, Los Angeles, will appoint 3 Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellows for a 2-year tenure beginning in the fall of 2003. Fellows must have earned their doctorates after September 1, 2000, and must have the doctorate in hand by September 1, 2003. The Fellowship provides a stipend of $35,000 per year. All Fellows are required to be in residence and to participate in the Consortium’s Mellon Seminar and Conference. Fellows will also teach, through relevant departments or programs, 1 course in their first year and 2 in their second, and will be expected to participate in the intellectual life of these programs. One Fellow will be appointed in each of three historical periods: C.E. 600 to 1600; 1600 to 1800; and 1800 to the present. These Fellowships are part of a 3-year program, 2001-2004, devoted to the theme “Nations and Identities.” The topic for 2003-2004 is “Nations and Identities: Minorities, Majorities, and the Question of Civil Society.” (The sub-topic for 2001-2002 was “Between Culture and State”; for 2002-2003, it was “Knowledges and Technologies.”)National identity has always involved the transcendence of cultural identities, including linguistic, ethnic, racial and religious affiliations, though different cultural communities have almost never shared equally in the benefits and responsibilities of given nations. The problem of minority identity would seem structurally inevitable, an inescapable remainder or supplement to any possible idea of national identity. Numerous questions arise here. What would a global history of minority-majority relations look like in reference to the rise of nation-states? Was there any relation between the emergence of enlightened forms of knowledge, liberal economics, and nation-state politics in the 16th-18th centuries and the systematic persecution of minorities in the centuries to follow? What would “minority” identity mean in the context of pre-modern dynastic, ecclesiastic, and imperial power, and how would an understanding of such settings help us to understand the predicament of minority identity in the modern nation-state? What is the role of civil society in meeting the challenges of minority-majority tension in the modern nation, especially if it is conceded that the tension may be structural and ineradicable? What is the potential of new transnational models of identity to make the very idea of national community seem obsolete? Finally, will the post-Cold-War global marketplace, in eroding the dominance of national identities, create a more open space for relatively autonomous non-national cultural communities, or will it reinforce national identities as the only viable way of defending indigenous cultures threatened with homogenization?
2002-2003: Knowledges and Technologies
The Humanities Consortium of the University of California, Los Angeles, will appoint 3 Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellows for a 2-year tenure beginning in the fall of 2002. Fellows must have earned their doctorates after September 1, 1999, and must have the doctorate in hand by September 1, 2002. The Fellowship provides a stipend of $35,000 per year. All Fellows are required to be in residence and to participate in the Consortium's Mellon Seminar and Conference. Fellows will also teach, through relevant departments or programs, 1 course in their first year and 2 in their second, and will be expected to participate in the intellectual life of these programs. One Fellow will be appointed in each of three historical periods: A.D. 600 to 1600; 1600 to 1800; and 1800 to the present. These Fellowships are part of a 3-year program, 2001-2004, devoted to the theme "Nations and Identities." The topic for 2002-2003 is "Knowledges and Technologies." (The topic for 2001-2002 was "Between Culture and State"; the topic for 2003-2004 will be "Minorities, Majorities, and the Question of Civil Society.")
By "knowledges and technologies" we mean first the network of relations linking science or technology, conceiving these very broadly as any collective strategy for controlling nature, to various modes of knowledge in the formation of national identity. For example, since Carleton Hayes's pioneering work on the nation in the 1920s, one fundamental nexus for the study of nations and technologies has been the rise of print culture. We may be at another such historical juncture, with the rise of global communications networks that more readily cross, and potentially challenge, national boundaries. But "knowledges and technologies" also refers to the way knowledge is produced along disciplinary lines within different cultural, religious, and national communities. Specific divisions of intellectual labor within knowledge-producing classes may have contributed to the emergence of the modern nation-state, from Medieval distinctions between ecclesiastical and secular law, to the increasing formalization of science within Western humanism, to the 18th-century rise of cultural autonomy in capitalist civil society. At the same time, non-Western writings from Mohandas K. Gandhi to Ashis Nandy link an opposition to Western technology and a suspicion of Western forms of knowledge to a resistance to the Western nation-state. Market-driven technology, scientific knowledge, national identity, and the nation-state would seem to be so intimately wedded to one another that it would be difficult to separate them. But what, finally, is this connection all about, and does the new "globalism" alter it? Applicants should address these or related issues.
2001-2002: Between Culture and State.
The Humanities Consortium of the University of California, Los Angeles, will appoint 3 Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellows for a 2-year tenure beginning in the fall of 2001. Fellows must have earned their doctorates no earlier than September 1, 1998, and must have the doctorate in hand by September 1, 2001. The Fellowship carries a stipend of $35,000 per year. All Fellows are required to be in residence and to participate in the Consortium's Mellon Seminar and Conference. Fellows will also teach, through relevant departments or programs, 1 course in their first year and 2 in their second, and will be expected to participate in the intellectual life of these programs. One Fellow will be appointed in each of three historical periods: A.D. 600 to 1600; 1600 to 1800; and 1800 to the present.
These Fellowships are part of a 3-year program, 2001-2004, devoted to the theme "Nations and Identities." The topic for 2001-2002 is "Between Culture and State." (Subsequent yearly topics are "Technologies and Knowledges" and "Minorities and Majorities: the Question of a Civil Society.") Early in the twentieth century, Friedrich Meinecke distinguished between the Kulturnation, or "largely passive cultural community," and the Staatsnation, or "active self-determining political nation," that is, nation as cultural or ethnic affiliation versus nation as political state. This distinction also implies two enduring ways of understanding the rise of the nation-state. One emphasizes the way deeply rooted components of cultural history--such as language, myth, and religion--remain indispensable to understanding modern national identity. Such a history would include the empires, nations, and peoples of antiquity, the composition of medieval universities and Church councils, the Renaissance city-state, Romantic notions of the "folk," and 19th-century theories of race. The other way underlines the often invented character of tradition and the dependence of the nation-state, from the 18th century onward, instead on the machinery of modern social organization: industrial production, communications infrastructures, developed markets, and evenly applied legal rights. Moreover, while many scholars locate the origins of the modern nation-state in the West, how should national identity be understood from the perspective of classical Indian or Chinese cultural community and dynastic rule? Is the nation-state form that has emerged today in much of Africa and Asia a natural (or necessary) development, or an accident of Western political hegemony? Applicants should address these or related issues.
2000-2001: Vital Signs.
The Humanities Consortium of the University of California, Los Angeles, will appoint 3 Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellows in the Humanities for 1-year fellowships during 2000-2001. One fellow will be appointed in each of 3 periods: Medieval-Renaissance, 17th-18th century; 19th-20th century. Applicants should be U.S. citizens, or recipients of doctorates from U.S. institutions and permanent residents of the U.S. They must have received their Ph.D. within the last four years (i.e. after Jan. 1, 1996). The fellowship's stipend is $33,000. The theme of the fellowship program for this year is: Vital Signs.
We are interested in reviewing applications in a wide range of disciplines, from the humanities to the history of science, from the Middle Ages to the present, concerning the distinction between living and non-living matter, or life and death, as well as the boundaries between different states or orders of life. The topic thus includes not only the relation between the organic and inorganic, or the animate and inanimate, but also that between humans and animals or plants, humans and the supernatural world, and humans and machines (from automata to artificial intelligence). We are also interested in questions of rebirth and regeneration, signs of growth and decay, and related issues in education, training, and domestication.
1999-2000: Sacred and Profane.
The theme of the fellowship program for 1999-2000 is: Sacred and Profane. From medieval canon law to Enlightenment skepticism to 20th-Century anthropology, "sacred" and "profane" have been elementary categories not only of religious life, but of social life in general. How cultures define--or blur--the shifting boundaries between sacred and profane things is a central but often unexamined question in many areas of scholarly inquiry. Equally important is the historical continuity of such categories within given societies. How have the vehicles of these categories, when subverted, been replaced by other means? What happens to the relationship of sacred and profane in the rise of European scientism, especially in the face of its "primitive" others? How do these categories continue to shape social passions as we enter the next millennium?
The 1999-2001 Mellon Postdoctoral Fellows
Abigail A. Firey (Ph.D. in Medieval Studies, 1995, University of Toronto)
Jonathan Sheehan (Ph.D. in History, 1995, UC Berkeley)
Scott Sprenger (Ph.D. in French Literature, 1995, Emory University)
Central to the work of the seminar is a definition of the passions as "any mental or emotional state that exceeds the boundaries of rational discourse." This includes inquiry into the traditional problems of desire and suffering, violence, intoxication and the aesthetic sublime, but could also include examination of more mundane forces in social life-from nationalism to communalism to virulent racism--that often tend to exceed the limitations that rational political structures impose upon them. It is also appropriate to consider the question of how does the unreasonable and the ungovernable become an object of knowledge and manipulation, if knowledge and manipulation imply control or containment?
The 1998-2000 Mellon Postdoctoral Fellows
Thomas Albrecht (Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, 1997, UC Irvine)
Charlene Villasenor-Black (Ph.D. in History of Art, 1995, University of Michigan)
Daniel M. Gross (Ph.D. in Rhetoric, 1998, UC Berkeley)
1997-98 Science and the Humanities: The Two Cultures Debate Revisited.
Humanists, social scientists, life and physical scientists met regularly with post-doctoral fellows Amir Alexander (Stanford University), Banu Subramaniam (Univ. of Arizona), and Michael Witmore (UC Berkeley) to explore the fundamental question of the relationship between knowledge and values in these two poles of intellectual life. Is contemporary society actually faced with two mutually incomprehensible forms of understanding? When and how did the paths between mathematical analysis and cultural analysis diverge? Can the practice of the sciences be understood from the perspective of cultural studies, or do the natural sciences operate an objective system of research? To what extent should humanists be allowed to shape the moral and ethical parameters of research in such areas as biotechnology and genetic engineering? Participants in the seminar discussed these and other issues, which are among the most vital facing California and the world as we prepare for the new millennium.
The 1997-1999 Mellon Postdoctoral Fellows
Amir Alexander (Ph.D. in History, 1996, Stanford University)
Banu Subramaniam (Ph.D. in Evolutionary Biology/Genetics, 1994, Duke University)
Michael Witmore (Ph.D. in Rhetoric, 1997, UC Berkeley)