Faculty Research Fellowship

School of Humanities
Humanities Research Center

We are pleased to invite applications for the HRC faculty research fellowships. These fellowships provide a one-semester teaching release during AY 2023-24. 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 and do not 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 14, 2022, 5 PM.

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 four academic years.
  • 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 of 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 broader publics.
  • 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
  • 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 Paula Platt, pauladp@rice.edu, by the application deadline.
  • Estimate of research funding needs that are not covered by 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 new VP for Research.

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 and the significance of the project in the applicant’s own scholarly and career 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 in recent years.  
  • An overview of significant leadership and service contributions to the department, program, school or university over the past five years.

APPLICATION >>

Notification of applicants by December 15, 2022.

For more information contact Paula Platt, pauladp@rice.edu.