During the Faculty Council review process, faculty and graduate students can continue to apply for HRC support of research projects, lecture series, workshops, and conferences. The faculty research fellowships (one semester teaching release) remain unchanged with a call for applications in early fall and fellowship notification in November. The HRC offers two or three post-doctoral fellowships (depending on available funding), usually for postdoctoral fellows external to Rice who conduct research and teaching in conjunction with one of our interdisciplinary initiatives and programs. All applications for HRC funding are evaluated by the HRC Faculty Council. Further, the HRC Faculty Council also seeks to support public humanities engagement by Rice faculty and graduate students and to build meaningful ties to communities and partner institutions in Houston and the surrounding region.
Thus far the HRC Council has identified three key tasks for the future Humanities Research Center:
Envision and shape the future of the humanities and the arts as connective practices
By building partnerships, engagements and understandings that transcend the disciplines, we aim to foster research and engagement in the humanities and the arts that are both locally rooted and globally linked across languages, cultures and forms. We see the future center as an intellectual hub that will foster groundbreaking humanities research and arts endeavors across a multitude of approaches, including public, digital, comparative, multilingual or theoretical.
Expand our vision of humanities graduate training for the 21st century
We seek to advance graduate education in the humanities beyond disciplinary bounds, build cohorts of PhD students across departments and programs, improve our recruitment and retention of graduate students by creating an intellectual community around shared humanities inquiry. In addition, we will support the preparation of graduate students for a wide range of future careers within and beyond the academy.
Design a structure to enhance our visibility, impact and community outreach
We aim to establish the future center as a collaborative hub, as a place for students, faculty and the community to come together to pursue the big questions of our times. We will establish an organizational and governance structure (with a director, support staff and a faculty council) that is an integral part of the School of Humanities and reporting to the dean, and that enhances the visibility and impact of scholarship and community outreach taking place across the school.