Resident Fellowship Competition

2024-2025

 

Established in 1976, the Calgary Institute for the Humanities (CIH) fosters advanced study and research in a broad range of subject areas. We are multi-disciplinary and multi-faculty orientated. We support research in traditional Humanities disciplines such as languages and literature, history, religious studies, philosophy, as well as in philosophical and historical aspects of the social sciences, arts, sciences, and professional studies. The humanities are not conceived as a specific group of academic disciplines, but as forms of study that examine what is human – typically guided by literature, history, social and physical settings, artifacts, visual and performing arts.

Announcing the 2024-25 CIH Resident Fellows

Portrait of Lee Carruthers

Lee Carruthers

2024-25 Naomi Lacey Resident Fellow
Associate Professor of Film
Department of Communication, Media and Film

Cinematic Late Style: Last Works and Late Culture

In recent commentaries, filmmakers and scholars have suggested that cinema may be in a
waning phase of development in which the enduring values of an artform will soon be eclipsed. This is a stark forecast for the medium and a significant one for its creative practitioners; whether for a mature director, or in terms of the medium’s evolution, one wonders how the work is transformed by the knowledge that it may be a final creative effort. In response, my research contemplates cinema in its late phase, highlighting the distinctive features of late works and the ways they reflect the values of our contemporary critical practice. It also examines the relationship between the late films of an individual artist and those produced during a late cultural phase, dissolving an artificial divide between aesthetic and cultural analyses. The research interrogates the heuristic value of the concept of ‘late style,’ mobilizing it as a sensitive descriptor for film’s aesthetic, technological, and cultural permutations. Thus, it aims to discover what late and last works mean to us, and to the filmmakers who have created them, during a period of profound change for cinema.

Portrait of Amanda Foote

Amanda Foote

2024-25 Graduate Student Fellow
PhD Student in Anthropology 
Department of Anthropology and Archaeology

Dagugun Woakide Akide Hnebigan Echin Bathtabi (Studying Museums in a Good Way)

Museums are important sites of representation where issues of identity, history, culture, and value are built and entrenched. Yet museums have traditionally been operated by an elite community of scholars, who do not represent the diverse cultures that are put on display. Indigenous people have been diligent advocates in seeking greater control of and access to their cultural belongings. Much scholarship exists on the criticality of this work for Indigenous communities, yet museums still grapple to accommodate notions of ownership and care from outside western norms. Working in the museum field I have learned much about nuanced challenges in supporting Indigenous people towards greater access and control of their material cultural belongings. This research furthers work that I have been doing to steward access and control for the Îethka Nation, and asks: how have formal structures impacted Indigenous access to, and control of, cultural belongings in museums and collections?

Portrait of Anurahda Gobin

Anuradha Gobin

2024-25 Resident Fellow
Associate Professor of Art History
Department of Art and Art History

Resistance Dance: Dolls, Dioramas and the Dutch Atlantic

This project seeks to foreground new types of knowledge that can be gleaned from objects often regarded as lacking scholarly merit: early modern doll houses and dioramas. Placing select doll houses and dioramas in conversation with more traditionally studied media such as paintings will facilitate an expanded understanding of the lived experiences of the enslaved who toiled on Dutch-owned Atlantic plantations. To structure this analysis, dance and the role of the senses will be used as the guiding theme. Dance practices were one of the few remaining links to African traditions and can be regarded as a rare display of bodily autonomy for enslaved men and women working on plantations. Ultimately, this project will contribute to calls for decolonising by demonstrating the importance of the senses to retrieve knowledge about the realities of groups who often left little physical traces such as material culture or texts in the archives.

Portrait of Janna Klostermann

Janna Klostermann

2024-25 Resident Fellow
Assistant Professor
Department of Sociology

Reimagining Meanings and Expectations around Gendered Care Work in Aging Communities: What can We Learn at the Limits?

What kinds of care stories resist and recast the inequitable histories, relations and meanings that underpin late life care in Canada? This project weaves approaches from the arts, humanities, and social sciences to transform issues in care provision in our aging society into conversations and practices that address complexities and open up creative possibilities. While a range of scholarship examines everyday work and organizational conditions in long-term residential care, to date, few studies have considered how meanings and expectations around gendered care work are actively being rethought and renegotiated, including through expressions of agency and resistance. Responding to this need, this project mobilizes feminist rhetorical and arts-based approaches (involving storytelling workshops and participatory community events) to spark new conversations about care ethics in aging communities. The aim is to learn from the insights of a feminized and racialized workforce, while uncovering and rethinking moral, relational and philosophical complexities.

Portrait of Jamie Michaels

Jamie Michaels

2024-25 Graduate Student Fellow
PhD Candidate in English
Department of English

Armageddon: A Comic Book History of the Nationalisms that Made the Modern Middle East 

Jews and Arabs have historically enjoyed generally positive relations. However, the last hundred years have been marred by seemingly intractable violence between Jewish and Arab nationalists. My work focuses on how art and literature might better enable Israelis and Palestinians to understand each other’s national narratives. Particularly, I’m interested in how popular history can be re-taught and re-imagined. My research-creation dissertation takes the form of a graphic novel showcasing the emergence of Jewish and Arab nationalisms. I curate the emergence of this nationalist sentiment amidst the backdrop of the First World War, a conflict that saw Jews and Arabs fighting as military allies. Crucially, this graphic history showcases both the Jewish and Arab perspectives of this turning point. Conjoining these narratives will create a singular work of history, deliberating juxtaposing a familiar history with a lesser-known narrative. In doing so, I aspire to the sharing of national stories between Israelis and Palestinians in new and surprising ways. 

Portrait of Anna Veprinska

Anna Veprinska

2024-25 Wayne O. McCready Emerging Fellow
Assistant Professor
Department of English

Listening as Pain and Necessity: Ear, Unfolding

My proposed book of poems traces an autotheoretical tension between my reduced tolerance to sound and my accessibility-driven reliance on listening. Exposure to an acoustically-traumatic event, which has triggered a sensitivity to noise pollution, has led to hyperacusis, a condition resulting in pain from everyday sounds. Meanwhile, an eye condition has led me to seek auditory accommodations, including structuring an oral history research project around my accessibility needs. With the improvement of text-to-speech software and the unprecedented rise of audiobooks, listening has become the method through which I access literary and cultural spaces and perform academic work. Drawing on the one hand from my auditory pain experiences and on the other from my oral history research and audio learning, my book of poems will ask what happens when one both has an intolerance to and a reliance on sound, probing the noise pollution health crisis and our collective acoustic futures.

Deadline and term

The current competition is closed. Resident Fellowship applications will next be accepted for the 2025-26 academic year.

Nov. 15, 2024

Tentative deadline to apply for a CIH Resident Fellowship for the 2025-26 academic year.


Purpose

Four annual Resident Fellowships are awarded to outstanding scholars in order to pursue a particular research project. Two of these are named: The Wayne O. McCready Resident Fellowship for an Emerging Scholar, and the Naomi Lacey Resident Fellowship. Success in the competition for these fellowships is based on assessment of the scholarly record of the candidate and the quality of the research proposal.

Fellowships will normally provide partial release from teaching duties to facilitate concentration on a research project. You must be free from administrative responsibilities and teach at a reduced course load during the Fellowship.

Your department/faculty will arrange for partial teaching release funding with the Institute. This will be a full-course equivalent course release (2HCE). Fellows will recieve one HCE course release each term, unless alternative arrangements are made with the director. Fellows will not receive a direct stipend.

You will conduct your research at the Institute. You will share your research in an in-house seminar, and involve yourself in the community of scholars working at the Institute. Fellows will offer a public lecture on the results of their research, either during the Fellowship year or the year following, in consultation with the director. You should acknowledge CIH support in all oral and written publications that result from the supported research.

Eligibility

The Calgary Institute for the Humanities will invite applications for Fellowships from full time faculty at the University of Calgary to conduct research at the Institute during the academic year 2025-26. Only scholars with teaching appointments at the University of Calgary that continue through the 2025-26 academic year are eligible to apply. Awards are subject to budgetary approval.

Applicants whom the committee judge to be on the verge of a significant scholarly advancement may be considered for the Wayne O. McCready Resident Fellowship for an Emerging Scholar. Candidates will be considered from the general pool of applicants; no separate application or information is required. Similarly, the Naomi Lacey Resident Fellowship will be awarded to an applicant from the general pool.

Full-time faculty of the University of Calgary who have previously held an Annual Fellowship are eligible for a second Annual Fellowship five years after the completion of the first Annual Fellowship. Applications from previous Annual Fellows will not be considered separately but will be considered within the pool of all applications. In addition to considering the merits of the new project, however, special attention will be paid to the productivity resulting from the first Fellowship. 

Applications will be judged on research record and the merits of the proposed project. The committee strives for a diversity of fellows in any given year where possible, based on such things as rank, discipline, and gender.

Research record will be judged relative to stage of career. Adjudicators will look at quality of previous publications, grants received, and productivity of previous grants and fellowships.

Project proposals will be assessed according to originality of the proposal, contribution to knowledge, suitability of methodology, suitability of theoretical perspectives, and effectiveness of the plan of communication for the research. If this is a multi-year project, applicants should make clear what they plan to accomplish during the year of the fellowship. Applications from outside the traditional humanities disciplines are welcome, and should make clear the humanistic orientation of their project.

Application procedure

Scholars outside of the traditional humanities disciplines should make clear the humanistic orientation of their project.

Applications must contain:

CV

A curriculum vitae. (No more than 5 pages.)

Proposal statement

A detailed statement of the research proposal. (A maximum of five pages, plus bibliography.)

Abstract

A descriptive title and abstract of 150 words.

Department head's statement

A brief statement from the applicant’s head of department indicating the department is aware of the application. (An email acknowledgement is sufficient.)