Mellon Just Futures Grant ~ Two-Year Visiting Faculty Fellow (EXPIRED)

Williams College invites applications for a two-year visiting faculty fellow in the arts, humanities, or humanistic social sciences, beginning January 1, 2022. We welcome applications from candidates who completed their Ph.D. or MFA within the last couple of years or who will have the Ph.D. or MFA in hand by the start date of the appointment. Williams is an institution that places a high value on undergraduate teaching; consequently, we seek applicants who can demonstrate in their supporting materials a capacity for excellent teaching and who have a commitment to working effectively with a student population that is broadly diverse with regard to gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, and religion.

The position requires vision, initiative, and a desire to join our vibrant community of scholars, practitioners, and activists who are part of an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded “Just Futures” project, Reimagining New England Histories: Historical Injustice, Sovereignty, and Freedom. This collaborative, interdisciplinary, public humanities project endeavors to reshape the ways young people, communities, scholars, and college students understand the history and present-day of New England. The project aims to use the sea as one lens to grapple with intertwined histories of Indigenous and African-American people and experiences in the Northeast, and the closely related impacts of colonization and enslavement that have so deeply affected multiple communities. Equally important, the project foregrounds the continuous work Black communities and sovereign Native nations and tribes have undertaken to maintain freedom, self-determination, and cultural thriving in this region. The project is a collaboration between Brown University and its Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice (CSSJ), Williams College (including the Williams-Mystic Program), and the Mystic Seaport Museum. The visiting faculty fellow selected for this position would be located at Williams College or Williams-Mystic, with many opportunities for working both in Williamstown, MA and in Mystic, CT.

Fellowship Terms

The salary for this position is $60,840 per year plus an allowance of $2,000 per year for research and professional travel expenses. The College will also provide health and dental benefits, relocation subsidy and college housing eligibility, and academic support including office space and a computer.

During the period of residence at Williams, the fellow will propose, develop, and offer one course each academic year and one course during Winter Study (our January term) that will address the project’s multidisciplinary, public humanities goals. The visiting faculty fellow will also undertake project work; participate in regular meetings of the partners and research cluster; contribute to exhibition research and writing in areas germane to their own subject expertise, and advise and mentor undergraduate and graduate students involved in the project. Their research contributions will be deployed in the making of an exhibition at Mystic Seaport Museum and/or in an edited volume and catalog. As part of the project-related activities, the visiting faculty fellow will work with another faculty fellow from Brown University’s CSSJ and with curators and other staff from Mystic Seaport Museum. The fellow will be part of a multi-partner research cluster and will be involved in developing relevant project programming.

Qualifications

We seek a candidate whose work engages with any one or more of the following topics, particularly in ways centered in the American Northeast/New England and/or this region’s hemispheric and global connections:

● Native American/Indigenous experiences, histories, cultures, politics, and expressions

● African-American experiences, histories, cultures, politics, and expressions

● Afro-Indigenous intersections, histories, and identities

● Maritime history and coastal studies, with a focus on diverse human communities’ interactions with the sea

● Critical examinations of settler colonialism and its legacies

● Critical examinations of racial slavery and its legacies

● Community-based and decolonial approaches to knowledge formation

● Public humanities and community-engaged forms of interpretation and expression