Campus Fellowships
HRI grants Campus Fellowships to Illinois faculty and graduate students, who spend the year engaged in research and writing and participate in the HRI Fellows Seminar.
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.
2027–28 HRI Fellowships: “Sovereignties”
About the Fellowship Theme
A word that first appeared in English in the 14th century, sovereignty is pluripotent. At its root are the indelible marks of “rule over” which makes it as much a claim as an imperative, and a singular one at that. Imperial sovereignty, national sovereignty, territorial sovereignty, state sovereignty, popular sovereignty, data sovereignty: These are all staples of history, political theory, law, international relations, cybersecurity, and more.
But as with all aspirations to power and hegemony, the term has long been open to appropriation and counter-claim. We need only think about the demands of bodily sovereignty and traditions of Indigenous sovereignty—or even distinctions between de jure and de facto sovereignty—to grasp how multiform its descriptive, analytical, and imaginative possibilities are.
And when we proactively pluralize it—when we imagine sovereignty as always already sovereignties—we materialize a set of scholarly force fields ripe for interdisciplinary inquiry across the full range of humanities, social science, and arts-based research.
HRI invites applications for the AY 27–28 Fellows Seminar from scholars whose research, methodology, and/or practice take up questions of sovereignty—whether literally or figuratively.
We live in a world where the notion of singular sovereignty is not simply a mode of power, but is arguably a source of attraction, appeal, and desire for many. How does your research take up the imaginaries, theories, histories, fictions, performances which engage sovereignties not only as juggernauts but as potential resources for clarifying the stakes—and interventions—of humanities-based inquiry now?
Can we work critically with sovereignties in their symbolic and material forms to move conversations about power forward? (How) can sustained attention to the plural potentiality of sovereignties help us advance humanistic knowledge and make sense of our pasts, presents, and futures?
In what ways does your way of working with sovereignties clarify your disciplinary and interdisciplinary commitments? Who are the readers who seek out your interventions and what are the forces arrayed against them? How does centering sovereignties—whether through voice, image, text, number, or some other figuration—change the conversation in your field/s? What are the challenges to your ways of thinking about sovereignties we can help you anticipate?
What, in short, will it mean for you to spend a year in the Fellows Seminar thinking aloud about sovereignties in the context of interdisciplinary humanities research and practice? How could such an encounter shape and even reshape your work?
The projects proposed to HRI for 2027–28 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 a commitment to fostering 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, 2026.