The University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI) has announced a number of grant opportunities available to UC tenure-track faculty members and graduate students. Grants will be awarded for such activities as research residencies, seminars, conferences, public humanities projects, fellowships and scholarships.
“Grad students and faculty members of all ranks are invited to apply for these grants, which are excellent opportunities for them to include graduate students in creative and innovative research opportunities,” UCHRI Director David Theo Goldberg said. “These prestigious awards are offered to foster multi-campus, collaborative, and multidisciplinary partnerships between UC researchers and their various potential audiences. We especially encourage programs that connect scholars with one another across the UC system and globally, and whose research and outcomes engage with publics beyond the academy.”
The grants will be awarded in 2015. Application deadlines begin in December. A list of all nine UCHRI grants and two related grants are listed online. For more information, visit http://uchri.org/uchri/funding-overview-and-calendar/.
Among the funding available are grants for the Fall 2015 Residential Research Group Fellowship on the History of Mortality. The convener is Karen Bassi, UC Santa Cruz professor of literature. Selected fellows will address the ways in which social, political, and environmental variables affect the discourse of mortality in a given period and geo-political sphere. They will study:
- the role of mortality in the evolution and dissemination of various cultural forms including literature, history writing, visual practices, religious beliefs, science and technology;
- the ways in which race, class and gender are defined and differentiated in terms of the risks and consequences of mortality;
- the rhetorical strategies that sustain various beliefs and practices aimed at accepting, denying, resisting, or deferring death;
- the built environment (monumental architecture, funerary inscriptions, national memorials to the war dead, etc.) as responses to the fact of mortality; and
- the effects and consequences of virtual worlds and other cyber-spatial environments in which death is an ever present but temporary state.
The public humanities grants — “Engaging Humanities” — will be awarded to scholars who propose innovative projects that combine humanities research and/or pedagogy with community engagement, building ties between UC campuses and California communities through research engagements and/or partnerships with community organizations, museums, non-governmental organizations or other public-facing groups.
Media Contact
Mimi Ko Cruz, mcruz@hri.uci.edu, 949-824-4587
About UCHRI
The University of California Humanities Research Institute was founded as a multicampus research unit of the UC Office of the President under the UC Humanities Initiative, established by former UC President David P. Gardner in 1987. In 2009, a new UC Humanities Network was developed and funded by a five-year grant from the UC Office of Research and Graduate Studies, incorporating and expanding the original Humanities Initiative. The Network links UCHRI, a refashioned Humanities Advisory Committee, and a new UC Consortium of Humanities Centers into a dynamic new structure and vision for multi-campus engagement and collaboration. Based on the UC Irvine campus, UCHRI serves all ten campuses in the UC system, interacting with UC campus humanities centers, other campus research centers, and with individual faculty to promote collaborative, interdisciplinary humanities research and pedagogy throughout the University of California system and within the larger communities they inhabit.
Banner image: David Theo Goldberg, back row at left, with UCHRI grant awardees from 2014.