News Posts

Considering submitting a fellowship application in Spring or Fall 2023? Faculty of all academic ranks are invited to sign up for the second annual Spring 2023 NEH Fellowship Writing Circle.

The writing circle is primarily designed to support faculty planning to submit proposals for the 2023 National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Fellowship or Summer Stipend programs, though faculty interested comparable fellowship programs such as American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) are invited to participate. (More humanities fellowships are organized by deadline on the humanities research development news site.) Early and mid-career faculty are especially encouraged to attend. We anticipate that through workshop, discussion, and revision, participants in the spring writing circle will strengthen their proposals and increase their competitiveness for fellowships. Additional goals of the group include helping you to hone your writing, present your projects to a broader audience, write sharper book proposals, and win fellowships beyond the NEH. You will also have the opportunity to make connections with, and get professional advice from, colleagues outside of your department.

The group will meet via Zoom, usually for 60 min per session to workshop a proposal. There will be a brief planning meeting in early February, with regular meetings that will run through early April. Writing circle members will be asked to (1) attend all meetings, (2) share a full project proposal with the group at least once, and (3) provide feedback on colleagues’ drafts, including serving as lead discussant at least once.

This year’s group will be led by Yüksel Sezgin, Associate Professor, Political Science, Director, Middle Eastern Studies Program, and Senior Research Associate, South Asia Center, who has successfully applied for both the NEH Fellowship and ACLS Fellowship. Dr. Sarah Workman, Assistant Director, Research Development (Humanities) will provide additional support to the group.

The group is generously supported by the Syracuse University Office of Research, the College of Arts and Sciences, and the Syracuse University Humanities Center.

The deadline to register is Tuesday, January 31, 2023. To register, fill out our brief application questionnaire online. Please be aware that space is limited, though we will do our best to support as many participants as possible.

MetLife Foundation, in partnership with Syracuse University Lender Center for Social Justice, and in collaboration with Syracuse University faculty in the Social Differences, Social Justice Research Cluster will be hosting its inaugural MetLife Foundation-Lender Center Symposium on March 30-31, 2023, at Syracuse University. The theme for the symposium is “Addressing the Racial Wealth Gap in the United States.”

The racial wealth gap is a continuous issue that undermines progress and opportunities that can be pursued by members of underserved and underrepresented communities in the United States. This symposium seeks to share research projects and exchange ideas among faculty, graduate students, and leaders across the academy, industry, and government on how to understand and respond to this crisis.

Call for Submissions

The MetLife Foundation-Lender Center Inaugural Symposium invites proposals from across the academy that help address the racial wealth gap. Faculty, post-doctoral fellows, and doctoral students are invited to participate, and collaborative and/or interdisciplinary projects are encouraged. Proposals can be based on humanistic, theoretical, empirical, case study, or applied research that addresses any of the following three tracks:

1. Structural and systemic factors positively or negatively impacting the building of generational wealth [e.g., slavery, settler colonialism, and historic legacies of racialized violence, racial capitalism, mass incarceration, inheritance laws, etc.]
2. Policies and practices that generate or minimize racial wealth disparities [e.g., redlining, urban renewal schemes, tax policy, predatory financing, healthcare burdens, racially disparate housing appraisals, etc.]
3. Individual and organizational-level factors influencing educational attainment, skills acquisition, and career development [e.g., educational inequities, hiring queues, corporate programs, etc.]

Within each track, projects are invited that:

1. identify and capture factors leading to or minimizing the racial wealth gap
2. capture the long-term impacts of the racial wealth gap
3. offer solutions to minimizing the racial wealth gap that are data driven and evidence-based
4. present arts- or humanities-based research as an alternative means of evidencing data and documenting narratives conveying either lived experiences of the racial wealth gap, or promising solutions.

Proposals that consider women, the disabled, and other historically marginalized groups are especially encouraged.

Format, Deadline, and Submission Process

All proposed submissions should be in a Microsoft Word document with 1-inch margins, 12-point font, single-spaced, approximately 500 words.

The deadline for providing submissions is January 27, 2023. All submissions should be emailed to LenderCenter@syr.edu with the subject heading listed as MetLife Foundation-Lender Center Inaugural Symposium Submission. Please use this email for questions about the Symposium or your submission as well.

Authors of selected submissions will be notified of acceptance by February 17, 2023.

For more than three decades, sociologist Prema Kurien has explored the relationship between international migration, race, ethnicity and religion with a focus on migrants from India and other countries in South Asia. She was an an apt choice when it came time to select a director for the South Asia Center (SAC) in the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs. Kurien, professor of sociology, took the helm as director of the SAC during the fall semester amid welcome news: The SAC and Cornell University—longtime consortium partners—have been awarded $1.05 million in grants from the U.S. Department of Education. The funding will be disbursed over the next four years and enables the SAC to continue as a Title VI National Resource Center (NRC) and provides students with Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowships. Read more.

Jamie Winders, professor of geography and the environment, was among the honorees at a recent celebration of migrants and their contributions to the fabric of American society hosted by the Center for Migration Studies (CMS) in New York City. Winders received the Excellence in International Migration Scholarship Award by CMS, a think tank that studies international migration and advocates for public policies that protect the rights and dignity of migrants. Read more.

A $10,000 Humanities New York Action grant will be used to present the work of globally known Onondaga Nation ceramic artist Peter B. Jones to expand awareness of the Haudenosaunee people and culture through a new art exhibition at the Syracuse University Art Museum and student and faculty teaching and community outreach. The grant has been awarded to the project’s co-directors, College of Arts and Sciences faculty member Sascha Scott, associate professor and director of the art history graduate studies program, and Scott Manning Stevens (citizen of the Akwesasne Mohawk Nation), associate professor of English and director of the Native American Studies program. They will coordinate with Emily Dittman, interim director of the Syracuse University Art Museum and instructor of museum studies in the School of Design in the College of Visual and Performing Arts. Read more.