ACADEMIC ANNOUNCEMENT:
Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship (DPDF) Faculty
Opportunities
The Social Science Research Council, with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, is pleased to announce a new program of fellowships and workshops for predissertation research and dissertation proposal development. The DPDF program is designed to intervene at a critical moment in the career development of graduate
students in the humanities and social sciences by aiding their transition from students to researchers. More information about the program may be found at: www.ssrc.org/ programs/ dpdf. The DPDF program invites interested faculty from US universities to participate as research directors leading groups of 10-12 graduate
student fellows in two four-day workshops. Each group will be led by two research directors, who will receive a stipend of $7,500 each.
Research Fields
The Faculty Advisory Committee of the DPDF program is actively recruiting senior faculty to lead small groups of graduate fellows in two sets of workshops (scheduled for May 17-20 in Denver; and September 6-9, 2007 in St. Louis). These workshops frame summer predissertation research in a series of research fields. A research
field refers to subdisciplinary and interdisciplinary domains with common intellectual questions and styles of research. These might come out of emergent fields, for example sustainability studies, visual culture, or biotechnology and society; fields could be constituted around geographic regions not traditionally mapped by current funding structures, such as Atlantic History, Pacific Rim Studies, or Maritime East Asia; or they might emerge from novel ways of encouraging comparative and interdisciplinary work, including a focus on specific kinds of sources, such as tax records, censuses, voting results, or art collections. Research fields can be topical in focus (e.g., youth and generational change, governance of empire, liberalism), transnational in scope (e.g., diasporas and refugees, illicit flows or border disputes), or comparative (e.g., studies of social entitlement, urban cultures, or collective protest).
Research Directors
The Faculty Advisory Committee will select five research fields, each proposed by two faculty research directors with different institutional affiliations and, as relevant, disciplinary specializations. These research directors will be responsible for selecting 10 to 12 graduate fellows; the research directors, with the assistance of SSRC staff, will run the spring and fall workshops that bracket the predissertation research of the students. Research directors should be tenured, experienced supervisors of thesis research. Each faculty member will receive a stipend of $7,500; students will receive up to $5,000 for summer predissertation
research.
Application Requirements and Deadline
The DPDF invites faculty to submit joint proposals of research fields for the 2007 fellowships. There is no formal application process, but letters of interest – no longer than 5 single-spaced pages – should describe the relevance of the research field and a short bibliography, the kind of graduate students who might be recruited, and the kinds of activities that would be entailed in each of the two
workshops, along with curricula vitae of the two research directors. Please submit letters and supporting documents electronically by November 15th, 2006.
Contact Person:
Neal Profitt, Program Coordinator
Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship Social Science Research
Council 810 Seventh Avenue, 31st floor New York, N.Y. 10019
phone: 212-377-2700 x478
fax: 212-377-2727
http://www.ssrc. org/programs/ dpdf
[sursa e-nass]
