The Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard invites you to apply for a fully funded one-year postdoctoral fellowship in connection with the seminar of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation of the Center on the topic of migration and humanities.
Migration plays such a critical role in the moral imagination of the humanities as it is in shaping the activist vision of humanitarianism and human rights. Too often, the humanities are summoned simply as witnesses to the spectacle of the important currents and crises of contemporary life. Literature and the arts are seen as iconic presences whose primary aesthetic and moral values reside in their illustrative powers of empathy and evocation. However, the intellectual formation of the humanities, their own conception of the nature of meaning, knowledge and morals, is deeply resonant with the displacement of values and the revision of the norms that shape the transitional and translational narratives of The lives of migrants.
Built around pedagogies of representation and interpretation (textual, visual, digital, political, ethical, ecological, etc.), the humanities are involved with the history of the changing relationships between cultural expression, historical transition and political transformation. In our time, migration and resettlement for indigenous belonging define the ethics of citizenship. While the humanities play a central role in defining the terms and territories of cultural citizenship, as it creates innovative institutions and identities in the formation of civil society.
Mahindra Center invites applications from academics in all fields whose work is innovatively involved with migration and the humanities. In addition to continuing the research, the fellows will also be main participants in biweekly seminar meetings. Other participants will include professors, Harvard graduate students and other universities, as well as occasional visiting speakers.
