The SSRC is pleased to announce a pilot postdoctoral fellowship program that will support transregional research under the rubric “Inter-Asian Contexts and Connections.” Its purpose is to strengthen the understanding of issues and geographies that don’t fit neatly into existing divisions of academia or the world and to develop new approaches, practices, and opportunities in international, regional, and area studies in the United States. Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, these fellowships will help junior scholars (those at the postdoctoral stage, one to seven years out of the PhD) complete first books and/or undertake second projects. In addition to funding research, the program will create networks and shared resources that will support Fellows well beyond the grant period.
The intellectual thrust of the pilot project will be the re-conceptualization of Asia as an interlinked historical and geographic formation stretching from the Middle East through Eurasia, Central Asia, and South Asia to Southeast Asia and East Asia. Proposals submitted for the fellowship competition should bear upon processes that connect places and peoples (such as migration, media, and resource flows) as well as those that reconfigure local and trans-local contexts (such as shifting borders, urbanization, and social movements). The broad focus of the program is intended to advance transregional research as well as to establish structures for linking scholars across disciplines in the arts, the humanities, and the social sciences. Fifteen fellowships will be awarded over the two-year course of the pilot program.
Application information can be found on the program website, and preliminary pre-proposals are due October 21, 2011