Research Fellowship

AY 2026-2027 Theme: Love, Beauty, and Attention

The Center for Philosophy of Religion at the University of Notre Dame is offering up to 5 residential fellowships during the 2026 – 2027 academic year for projects on the theme of “Love, Beauty, and Attention." Fellows will pursue independent research while interacting with leading scholars in philosophy and theology during a year in residence at Notre Dame’s Center for Philosophy of Religion.

This fellowship program is open to both recent Ph.D.'s and established scholars. The Center typically funds scholars in philosophy and theology; but we have occasionally funded researchers in other humanities disciplines. Our weekly works-in-progress group is primarily attended by our visiting fellows and local faculty and graduate students in philosophy, and our priority will be to fund projects on the 2026 – 2027 research theme that can be productively engaged in that context.

Successful applicants who have recently received their Ph.D. will be appointed as postdoctoral fellows, funded at $80,000 plus benefits. Established scholars will need to request leave from their home institutions in order to accept the fellowship; we ask that you verify that the amount of funding required by your home institution for such an arrangement is less than or equal to $80,000 before applying.

For the 2026 - 2027 academic year, we are especially interested in research proposals that engage the theme of “Love, Beauty, and Attention.” Many philosophers and theologians, both historical and contemporary, have posited important connections between love and beauty, between love and certain kinds of attention, and between beauty and different modes of attention. Recent work in theology and philosophy of religion has explored questions about the nature of divine love, about ways in which divine love might differ from human love, and about how beauty or the experience of beauty might lead human beings into a loving relationship with God. Attention (and its connections to beauty and love) has been a focus of recent scholarship on prayer, mystical experience, and spiritual formation. Contemporary epistemologists, too, have become increasingly interested in the norms of inquiry and hence norms of attention - norms which may affect agents' abilities to perceive beauty or to engage lovingly with the world. These are just a few of the many questions one might explore under the auspices of our 2026 - 2027 fellowship theme.

 Although we are happy to consider any proposal investigating the concepts of love, beauty, and attention individually or in conjunction with one another, we are particularly interested in projects that will do so in dialogue with contemporary moral psychology, epistemology, or theology.  Historically focused proposals are also welcome; and here we have special interest in projects that will engage the work of Plato, Augustine, Soren Kierkegaard, Simone Weil, or Iris Murdoch in ways that will be accessible to analytic philosophers and theologians.