The Humanities Research Institute (HRI) is pleased to announce that its 2025–26 Fellowship year theme is “Story and Place.”
HRI welcomes applications from all disciplines and departments with an interest in humanities and humanities-inflected research. HRI is especially interested in fostering interdisciplinary work, both within the humanistic disciplines, and between the humanities and the arts.
ABOUT THE THEME
In spite of the impact of global economic and culture forces on our lives—and of course because of it—attention to the particularity of place remains key to how humanists and artists think about the world. How does your work engage with place-based experiences, histories, performative cultures, languages, politics, literatures? What does storytelling that emerges from specific places and spaces contribute to how we apprehend the visual, the material, the political, the queer, or the orthodox?
Place often takes root through story, but it is as often made in the telling. How can storytelling and story-making create place and its attachments—or unravel it, or make it legible to new audiences? What is the role of place-based story in how we grapple with war, social movements, equity work, fantasy, political ideology, art practice, social media, ecological crisis, and/or the land grant university itself? And what is “place” beyond the local, exactly?
HRI invites proposals which engage the intersection of place and story in a variety of mediums— narrative, textual, maker-oriented, graphic, and more. We look forward to learning from humanities- and arts-based researchers who are working with place at any scale and in any number of forms. We’re interested in the geography closest in or the farthest out; in stories that stick close to home or those that carry home with them as they move.
We’re curious, in short, about multi-form ways of exploring the places, real and imagined, that help us reckon with the world as we know it, tell it, and want it to be told. If place is a backdrop to how you are communicating your work, this is an opportunity, in the context of a yearlong interdisciplinary seminar, to converse with colleagues interested in experimenting with how to bring place and storytelling into sharper relation.
Complete fellowship application guidelines for 2025–26 can be found on the HRI website: Faculty info / Graduate Student info The submission portal will open on September 1, 2024.
Learn more about HRI's campus fellowships.
