Now accepting applications for the Environmental Humanities Fellowship, 2025-2027
Description
The Center for the Humanities at Tufts University, in partnership with the Mellon Foundation-funded project University Ecologies and the Question of the Commons, invites applications for a residential postdoctoral fellowship beginning July 1, 2025. The fellowship is for a duration of two years. The fellow will take a leading role in a university-wide collaborative research project focused on reimagining campus environments, challenging hierarchies of knowledge production, diversifying monocultural ecologies such as lawns, and deconstructing the histories of land possession and animal production that higher education institutions have supported.
The fellow will participate in biweekly seminars and working groups, attend and help organize public events, and work with visiting artists, scholars, and activists towards various project-related outputs. The fellow will contribute no more than 15 hours/week of service to this project, and will be offered support to pursue their own research and publication agendas as well. There are no mandatory teaching responsibilities associated with this position.
The fellow will receive a stipend of $65,100 in 2025-2026 (increasing with inflation in 2026-2027), will be eligible for Tufts University health benefits, and will have a workspace at the Center for the Humanities. They will be offered an opportunity to workshop manuscripts in progress and will be part of a vibrant community of researchers and scholars at the Center for the Humanities.
Project Abstract: Many important environment justice studies are emerging from universities, conducted with communities most impacted by the transformations of state and capitalist projects. Less critical attention is paid to the university institution itself as a historical and ongoing generator of unequal ecologies. From chemically saturated lawns to confined animal feeding operations, the American university has often led the development of labor-intensive ecological monocultures that fence out biological diversity while fencing in a select few fragile species and marginalized human communities. This three-year project explores, questions, and complicates what it might mean to re-common these university ecologies. Developing modes of collaboration across inherited divisions of class, labor and geography, this project models a vision of education and knowledge production for a collective agriculture that centers those dispossessed of land, and those now made to work within these terrains.
Qualifications
We seek a junior scholar whose research broadly engages the themes and concerns of the project, with a PhD from any humanities or humanistic social sciences field.
Application Instructions
Applicants should submit a cover letter, CV, and a 1500-word research description to Interfolio, along with the names and contact information for three references. Three confidential letters of recommendation will be requested of semi-finalists. Review of applications will begin February 1, 2025 and continue until the position is filled.
Application available on Interfolio
For questions, contact:
Alex Blanchette Alex.Blanchette@tufts.edu
Silvia Bottinelli silvia.bottinelli@tufts.edu
