SSRC Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship,
11/06
Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship (DPDF)
Faculty Opportunities
The Social Science Research Council, with funding from the Andrew W.
Mellon Foundation, is pleased to announce a new program of fellowships
and workshops for predissertation research and dissertation proposal
development. The DPDF program is designed to intervene at a critical
moment in the career development of graduate students in the humanities
and social sciences by aiding their transition from students to
researchers. More information about the program may be found at:
www.ssrc.org/programs/dpdf. The DPDF program invites interested faculty
from US universities to participate as research directors leading groups
of 10-12 graduate student fellows in two four-day workshops. Each group
will be led by two research directors, who will receive a stipend of
$7,500 each.
Research Fields
The Faculty Advisory Committee of the DPDF program is actively
recruiting senior faculty to lead small groups of graduate fellows in
two sets of workshops (scheduled for May 17-20 in Denver; and September
6-9, 2007 in St. Louis). These workshops frame summer predissertation
research in a series of research fields. A research field refers to
subdisciplinary and interdisciplinary domains with common intellectual
questions and styles of research. These might come out of emergent
fields, for example sustainability studies, visual culture, or
biotechnology and society; fields could be constituted around geographic
regions not traditionally mapped by current funding structures, such as
Atlantic History, Pacific Rim Studies, or Maritime East Asia; or they
might emerge from novel ways of encouraging comparative and
interdisciplinary work, including a focus on specific kinds of sources,
such as tax records, censuses, voting results, or art collections.
Research fields can be topical in focus (e.g., youth and generational
change, governance of empire, liberalism), transnational in scope (e.g.,
diasporas and refugees, illicit flows or border disputes), or
comparative (e.g., studies of social entitlement, urban cultures, or
collective protest).
Research Directors
The Faculty Advisory Committee will select five research fields, each
proposed by two faculty research directors with different institutional
affiliations and, as relevant, disciplinary specializations. These
research directors will be responsible for selecting 10 to 12 graduate
fellows; the research directors, with the assistance of SSRC staff, will
run the spring and fall workshops that bracket the predissertation
research of the students. Research directors should be tenured,
experienced supervisors of thesis research. Each faculty member will
receive a stipend of $7,500; students will receive up to $5,000 for
summer predissertation research.
Application Requirements and Deadline
The DPDF invites faculty to submit joint proposals of research fields
for the 2007 fellowships. There is no formal application process, but
letters of interest - no longer than 5 single-spaced pages - should
describe the relevance of the research field and a short bibliography,
the kind of graduate students who might be recruited, and the kinds of
activities that would be entailed in each of the two workshops, along
with curricula vitae of the two research directors. Please submit
letters and supporting documents electronically by November 15th, 2006.
Contact Person:
Neal Profitt, Program Coordinator
Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship
Social Science Research Council
810 Seventh Avenue, 31st floor
New York, N.Y. 10019
phone: 212-377-2700 x478
fax: 212-377-2727
http://www.ssrc.org
From: Matthew Pohl mailto:[pohl@ssrc.org]
Sent: Sat, October 14, 2006
Page Editor: Ali B. Ali-Dinar, Ph.D.