Campus Fellowships
HRI grants fellowships to Illinois faculty and graduate students, who spend the year engaged in research and writing.
Faculty fellows are provided with one semester of release time and research funds. Graduate student fellows are given a stipend and a tuition and partial fee waiver for the academic year of the award. All Fellows are expected to maintain residence on the Illinois campus during the award year, and to participate in HRI activities, including the yearlong Fellows Seminar.
2024–25 HRI Fellowships: “Think Again...”
HRI is pleased to announce that its 2024–25 fellowship year theme will be “Think Again...”
What is the impulse of research? To encourage ways of thinking differently about a subject, an established theory, a reigning assumption about how things work. That is, the questions we investigate should require us to reconsider the world as we know it and make the case for our work as an intervention in what passes for settled or given in our field /s of inquiry. This is an especially pressing challenge for interdisciplinary humanities research, which is typically boundless, both substantively and methodologically, yet can fall short of specifying how and why it aims to rethink norms or re-orient emerging paradigms.
HRI’s 2024–2025 theme, “Think Again,” is an invitation to revisit well-known texts, to upend dominant narratives, to historicize what appears self-evident in the present, and/or to ask what happens when we juxtapose x with y in ways never been done before. It asks us to consider who our audiences are; who we are as researchers; how the fields we work in are constituted; and what it means to develop our capacities to talk across disciplinary boundaries. “Think Again” underscores, too, the opportunity to think across diverse interdisciplinary formations, and to identify when, how and under what conditions new ones may be happening.
In that sense, “Think Again…” is as much an opportunity to reflect on methodologies and the forms of expression or narration they entail as it is a theme per se. What does your work require us to re-think, re-imagine, re-design, re-verse, re-animate, re-cast, re-contextualize, re-direct, re-make?
Capacious yet pointed, the provocation “think again” directs us not just to explore our subject matter but in doing so, to identify the stakes of our research for the variety of audiences it hails: to say why it matters, and to whom. If you are thinking about applying for the HRI Campus Fellows Seminar, we encourage you to think your project—whatever it may be—through this pivotal question: how does it ask us to think again, about what, and/or why, and/or how, and/or by whom? We hope to gather a group of scholars whose work may be thematically wide-ranging but who are invested in honing their approaches to interdisciplinary thinking and practice in a seminar context where we will bring all our energies to bear on these questions.
The projects proposed to HRI for 2024–25 fellowships will be evaluated on the scholarly excellence and promise of the project, the applicant’s preparation/readiness to undertake the proposed research, the quality of the narrative proposal, the relationship to the annual theme, the case made for how the interdisciplinary experience offered by the Fellows Seminar would be beneficial to the project, and the letters of support.
HRI welcomes applications from all disciplines and departments with an interest in humanities and humanities-inflected research. HRI is especially interested in fostering interdisciplinary work, both within the humanistic disciplines, and between the humanities and the arts.
See the links below for specific guidelines. The submission portal will open on September 1, 2023.
Fellowship RFPs
Current Fellows
Past HRI Fellowship Themes
See past Campus Fellows and themes under History