External Faculty Fellowships

With generous funding from the Lynette S. Autrey Endowment and the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Humanities Research Center hosts up to four visiting professors for one semester each academic year. The fellows teach a course affiliated with a humanities department and take part in the intellectual life of the Center. The HRC sponsors special symposia or conferences centered on their research. These programs give Rice faculty and students significant exposure to eminent scholars from around the world.

The deadline for 2012-13 applications has passed.

Mary Poovey, the Samuel Rudin University Professor in the Humanities at New York University, was selected as a Spring 2011 External Faculty Fellow.  She says of the program: "What Rice is doing with these [external faculty] fellowships can help the students, faculty fellows and the fellows' home institutions. It breaks down insularity and helps us ask new questions and re-examine how we do things. I'm excited to begin this fellowship because I think it will give me a new circle of interlocutors with whom I can discuss ideas that can't fit within any disciplines.  The future of the humanities rests upon its ability to forge alliances with other disciplines, with social sciences and sciences. It's extremely forward-thinking and far-reaching of the HRC and fellowship selection committee to offer these fellowships and allow humanities to reach beyond its borders."

2011-12 External Faculty Fellowships

Fall 2011
	Kairn A. Klieman, associate professor of history at the University of Houston Before the "Curse": Petroleum, Politics, and Transnational Oil Companies in the Gulf of Guinea, Africa, 1890's-1980's Through a series of theoretically-linked case studies situated in the watershed moments of African oil history, Klieman's project provides a history of the changing nature of relations between transnational oil companies, their home governments, and the colonial and post-colonial governments of sub-Saharan Africa, and also elucidates specific events, decisions, and policies that have contributed to the development of the "Oil Curse" - the phenomena whereby despite a massive influx of oil revenues, political, economic, and developmental processes stagnate, creating some of the most authoritarian, impoverished, and corrupt societies in the world. By identifying the historical roots of this modern problem, the book will provide important contributions to the fields of African history, U.S. diplomatic history, international oil history, the history of globalization, and the growing body of literature on the Natural Resource Curse in developing nations.
Fall 2011 & Spring 2012
	Kenneth Loiselle, assistant professor of history at Trinity University Enlightenment and Revolution in the French Atlantic: Freemasonry from the Old Regime to Napoleon This study examines the history of Freemasonry in metropolitan and colonial France from the pre-revolutionary era to 1804. Loiselle's research explores the structural aspects of Masonic sociability during the revolutionary moment as well as the cultural changes wrought by political developments. Topics to be examined include the changing profile of membership in lodges, the relationship between political orientation and Masonic affiliation amongst elites, and the presence of the French and Haitian Revolutions in Masonic cultural texts, notable speeches and songs. This research can help answer a classic question that has continually preoccupied scholarly communities within the humanities as well as political scientists who study revolutionary processes: How were the Enlightenment and the political revolutions of the late eighteenth century in France and Saint-Domingue (later Haiti) interrelated?

2012-2013 External Faculty Fellows

	John J. May, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, University of Toronto Spectral Visions: The Birth of the Energetic of Environment May’s project focuses on the historical relationship between Postwar scientific instruments and the changing composition of the concept of environment. Examining imaging as a form of environmental representation, he argues that our understanding of the environment is fundamentally inseparable from the emergence of imaging. His project aims to produce a technical and conceptual genealogy of the environmental image, a theory of representation commensurate with questions and problems being posed around the concept of environment, which are today reshaping both the humanities and design practice. In so doing, this research shows how imaging has reorganized and restructured the entire scientific-bureaucratic apparatus that today takes ‘the environment’ as its object of concern.
	Paul B. Jaskot, Professor of Art and Architecture, DePaul University Cultural Fantasies, Ideological Goals, Political Economic Realities in the Built Environment of Auschwitz This project examines the archive of Auschwitz’s architectural office, one of the largest collections of evidence of a single building office’s activity during the Nazi regime. Using art historical tools to analyze the construction of this politically charged institutional environment, Jaskot explores the intersection of the cultural priorities of the SS, the organization of forced labor for construction, as well as the intertwines goals of racist genocide and imperialist expansion. The SS designed and planned hundred of vernacular structures for the camp that changed dynamically in form and function with war conditions. He argues that the SS building at Auschwitz became a deadly intersection of delusional planning, pragmatic realities, and destructive capacities.
	Simon Keller, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Victoria University of Wellington Understanding Disagreement about Climate Change: Skepticism, Ideology, and Experts The disagreement about climate science is a stark feature of political debate and an obstacle to meaningful action on climate change. To understand why people of different political views disagree about climate change, Keller argues that we must understand our relationship with experts and how ideological commitments can rationally influence decisions about which experts to trust. His project specifically examines the disagreement about climate change as a manifestation of rational attitudes to expertise. He examines the types of arguments offered, the sources of argumentation, and the channels through which a concerned non-expert should decide which sources to trust.

Click here to see a list of past External Faculty Fellows