Faculty Research Fellowships

School of Humanities & Humanities Research Center
The deadline for the 2024–25 cycle has passed. Please check back in Fall 2024 for our 2025–26 Faculty Research Fellowship cycle.

 

Updated guidelines will be posted in advance of the next deadline. In the meantime, please use these guidelines to get a sense of what is involved in assembling an application.

We are pleased to invite applications for the HRC faculty research fellowships. These fellowships provide a one-semester teaching release during AY 2024–25. They are competitively awarded with the goal of facilitating the initiation, completion, or development of faculty research projects.

Because these fellowships involve teaching releases, department chairs must endorse fellowship applications. We do not require or encourage lengthy letters of recommendation from department chairs. Chairs are encouraged to consider the department’s curricular needs when providing endorsements for faculty fellowships and applicants are encouraged to converse with their chairs about their longer-term curricular commitments. Fellows are expected to continue their departmental service/leadership roles and their supervision of doctoral students.

Deadline: Monday, November 6, 2023, 11:59 PM (Central Time)

Eligibility:

  • Tenured or tenure-track faculty members in the Rice University School of Humanities are eligible to apply, provided they have not held a Humanities Faculty Fellowship in the last five academic years prior to the fellowship award year.
  • Assistant professors in their first year at Rice are not eligible to apply.
  • Applicants should include a brief statement of endorsement by their department chair. Should the applicant be a current department chair, an endorsement from the Dean of Humanities is required. Please note that departments cannot count on compensation to cover the released courses, although the Dean’s office does try to work with departments to support their curricular needs.
  • The terms of this leave adhere to University and Faculty Senate policies on scholarly leave for faculty (Policy 208).
  • Applicants should include information on any external grants or fellowships for which they have recently applied or to which they have open applications.

Application Materials:

  • Applicant’s most recent CV (no more than 10 pages)
  • Project title and abstract (no more than 200 words).
  • Project description (5 pages maximum, double-spaced). In language suited to a multi-disciplinary advisory panel, the description should:
    • Explain the nature and significance of the project, including its impact on relevant scholarly communities, or on the broader public.
    • Include a brief history of prior research or planning, past support, and future plans for the research project.
    • Describe the scope and resource materials of the research project, the main issues to be addressed, and the relationship of the research to other published and ongoing work in the field.
  • Estimate of research funding needs that are not covered by the applicant’s annual research funds. We cannot promise that we will be able to add research sums to these fellowships, but we consider it helpful to know about relevant research needs in the event that an opportunity arises to request additional research funding from the VP for Research.
  • Endorsement from the applicant’s department chair (should the applicant be a department chair, the endorsement from the dean), which should be emailed directly to Gabriela Garcia (gabriela.garcia@rice.edu) by the application deadline. The endorsement letter should address the faculty member's service to the department as well as the logistics regarding the faculty member's teaching release for the semester.

Review / Selection Process:

Proposals are evaluated by the HRC Faculty Council according to the following criteria:

  • The intellectual significance of the research project within the disciplinary or interdisciplinary arenas that are most definitive.
  • The clarity of conceptual framing, methods, and the significance of the project in the applicant’s own scholarly trajectory.
  • The feasibility of the proposed timeline for the project, including specific goals for the fellowship semester and plans for project completion/submission/publication/exhibit/performance.
  • In addition, the committee will consider the history of past scholarly leaves, including sabbaticals over the past six years, as well as the applicant’s contributions to leadership and service at the department, school, and/or university level over the past five years.  

Applicants in the 2024–2025 cycle will be notified by December 15, 2023.

For more information, please contact Gabriela Garcia at gabriela.garcia@rice.edu.