Modeling Interdisciplinary Inquiry
How to Apply
Washington University in St. Louis announces the nineteenth year of Modeling Interdisciplinary Inquiry, a postdoctoral fellowship program endowed by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, designed to encourage interdisciplinary scholarship and teaching across the humanities and interpretive social sciences. We invite applications from recent PhDs, DPhils, or D.F.A.s (in hand by June 30, 2019, and no earlier than June 30, 2014) for a position as Fellow. In September 2019, the newly selected Fellows will join the University’s ongoing interdisciplinary programs and seminars. The Fellows will receive a two-year appointment with a nine-month academic year salary beginning at $54,150 per year. Postdoctoral Fellows pursue their own continuing research in association with a senior faculty mentor at WU. During the two years of their tenure, they will teach three undergraduate courses and collaborate in leading an interdisciplinary seminar on theory and methods for advanced undergraduates and beginning graduate students in the humanities and social sciences.
Applicants should submit, through Interfolio, a cover letter, a description of their research program (no more than 1800 words and accessible to reviewers in other fields), a brief proposal for an interdisciplinary seminar in theory and methods, and a curriculum vitae. Applicants who have not completed their doctoral work should indicate, in their cover letter, how many chapters of their dissertation are complete and how complete the remaining chapters are. Applicants should arrange for the submission of three confidential letters of recommendation, also via Interfolio.
Washington University in St. Louis is committed to the principles and practices of equal employment opportunity and affirmative action. It is the University’s policy to recruit, hire, train, and promote persons in all job titles without regard to race, color, age, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, veteran status, disability, or genetic information.
The means to these ends are found in the framework of Modeling Interdisciplinary Inquiry with its mentorships, its seminar in Theory and Methods, the integration of postdoctoral fellows within our undergraduate curriculum, and the involvement of a Steering Committee of senior faculty drawn from across the humanities and social sciences who have shown commitment to interdisciplinary work. Thus, the two-year fellowship allows fellows to confirm their bona fidesin an “aspirational” discipline, and to devise courses and pursue scholarship that models deep, answerable interdisciplinary engagement.
Modeling Interdisciplinary Inquiry brings together a cadre of scholars who are already making interdisciplinary forays, and whose experience with mentors at Washington University will sharpen their awareness of and their ability to contribute to real and substantial collaboration between humanists and social scientists at the undergraduate, graduate, and research levels. This postdoctoral program is not intended to produce more scholars for an already crowded marketplace but rather to produce practitioners for whom the kind of collegial collaboration that has been so productive in the sciences becomes an important addition to the traditional model of the single and often isolated scholar. At Washington University the humanities and social sciences faculty see this postdoctoral program as an important initiative and an exciting opportunity both for the university and for new scholars trained in and wishing to advance the conversation, the collegiality, and the modes of inquiry within and across disciplines that have become essential to the growth of the university and of the fields and modes of knowledge that the university takes as its domain.
This opportunity has expired. It was originally published here:
https://mii.wustl.edu/how-to-apply/