Press Releases

Friday, November 21, 2008

Research Fields and Faculty Selected for Third DPDF Competition

Applications Portal Now Open (Deadline: January 30, 2009)

To promote innovation in interdisciplinary research in the United States, the Social Science Research Council has appointed five teams of social science and humanities faculty to lead national workshops that will advance the research and careers of promising young scholars.

In a highly competitive process, pairs of faculty members based at 10 American universities were selected to initiate or revitalize interdisciplinary fields of research of both societal concern and scientific merit: agrarian life, scientific definitions of humanity, visualizations of empire, economic development, and state violence.

These prestigious awards will enable the selected faculty to attract graduate student researchers from across the country and introduce the students to new approaches to research and interpretations that are intended to guide them into careers of research that will improve understandings of important issues confronting American society.

Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the program, called the Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship (DPDF), aims to advance both interdisciplinary research and scholarly careers to focus on issues of broad public significance. Each year, faculty and students from all social science and humanities disciplines are respectively invited to propose fields and seek research training.

SSRC will next recruit competitively graduate students to work with selected scholars in interdisciplinary fields as follows (click on the names of each field for fuller descriptions and on the faculty names for short bios):

FIELD: Critical agrarian studies
RESEARCH DIRECTORS: Marc Edelman (City University of New York Graduate Center) and Wendy Wolford (North Carolina-Chapel Hill)

Ongoing struggles over the production and consumption of food, fuel and fiber have shaped twenty-first century modernity. Critical Agrarian Studies takes these struggles--and their historical antecedents--as its central concern.

FIELD: Cultures and histories of the human sciences
RESEARCH DIRECTORS: Elizabeth Lunbeck (Vanderbilt University) and Emily Martin (New York University)

This field is loosely organized around the broad question of 'the human' as the subject of scientific and social scientific inquiry from the eighteenth century to the present.

FIELD: Empires of vision
RESEARCH DIRECTORS: Martin Jay (UC Berkeley) and Sumathi Ramaswamy (Duke University)

This field proposes that global empires and modern regimes of visuality were mutually implicated, and even in important ways constitutive of each other. It stands at the crossroads of two of the most vibrant interdisciplinary fields in contemporary humanist and social scientific scholarship: colonial and post-colonial studies and visual culture.

FIELD: Revitalizing development studies
RESEARCH DIRECTORS: Ben Ross Schneider (Northwestern) and Andrew Schrank (University of New Mexico)

This field will bring together an interdisciplinary group of scholars interested in developing a transdisciplinary language and toolkit capable of enhancing our understanding of international development and inequality.

FIELD: State violence
RESEARCH DIRECTORS: Ivan Ermakoff (Wisconsin- Madison) and Stathis Kalyvas (Yale)

Although recent research has shed significant light on the causes and dynamics of insurgent violence, state violence remains noticeably under-explored. This field plans to build on these recent advances to broaden and deepen our understanding of state violence and to move toward an analysis focusing on the strategic and organizational underpinnings of violence.

The DPDF program is now accepting applications for the 2009 fellowships cycle from doctoral students interested in writing their dissertations on topics relating to one of these five areas. The application deadline is Friday, January 30, 2009 (9:00 PM, EST).

The DPDF program has been running annual fellowships competitions since 2007. For more information, please visit the DPDF Web site or contact program staff at dpdf@ssrc. org.