Faculty Research Fellowships

Deadline: Monday, December 2, 2024

N.B.: In light of Dean Canning's memo sent out on Wednesday, November 20, 2024, the Humanities Research Center is amending its eligibility requirements and review procedures to take into consideration the number of courses and students taught over the past three years.

The Humanities Research Center, in partnership with the School of Humanities, offers one-semester teaching releases to select School of Humanities faculty. These fellowships 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. Should the applicant be a current department chair, an endorsement from the Dean of Humanities is required. 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.

Please note that this fellowship does not carry a monetary award. Fellows do not receive a research stipend, and 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.

Fellows are expected to continue their departmental service/leadership roles and their supervision of doctoral students. Fellows are also expected to attend a monthly fellows meeting throughout the academic year of the fellowship.

The terms of this leave adhere to University and Faculty Senate policies on scholarly leave for faculty (Policy 208).

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.
  • Faculty applicants must have been at Rice University for at least one year and have taught at least four courses to be eligible to apply.
  • Faculty outside the School of Humanities may apply, but the fellowship award is contingent on a teaching release award made by the applicant's respective School's dean.

Application Materials:

  • Project proposal, including the following:
    • 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; and
      • 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.
    • Information on any external grants or fellowships for which you have recently applied or to which you have open applications. Please 
    • 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.
  • CV (most recent; no more than 10 pages)
     
  • A list of all courses and enrollment numbers per course over the past three years. Please be sure to specificy the course level, the semester/year in which the course was taught, and the number of students who were enrolled in each course, from Fall 2021 through Fall 2024 (inclusive).
     
  • A list of all forms of leave and course releases held over the past five years, including HRC faculty research ("teaching-release") and external fellowships, ad-hoc teaching releases, and sabbaticals
     
  • Chair endorsement:
    • Endorsement from the applicant's department chair (should the applicant be a department chair, the endorsement from the dean). Endorsement letters should be directly uploaded to the following Box folder by the application deadline: https://rice.app.box.com/f/891c5bd98f5b4541a9f500ad42f062ee. 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.
  • The number of courses and students taught over the past three years.
  • The history of past scholarly leaves, including sabbaticals over the past six years, as well as the applicant’s contributions to leadership, service, and community at the department, school, and/or university level over the past five years.
  • Selected finalists are subject to approval by the Dean of Humanities.

Fall Deadline: Monday, December 2, 2024
Applicants will be notified by December 20, 2024.

CLICK HERE TO SUBMIT YOUR PROPOSAL

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