Postdoctoral/MFA Fellowships
Applications for 2012-13 IAH Postdoctoral/MFA Fellowships: Being Humans
What does it mean, and what has it meant, to be human? What might "the human" mean in the foreseeable and unforeseeable future? These are the questions that animate the arts and humanities–and that will define the work of Penn State's Institute for the Arts and Humanities. In 2010-11, the Institute created a postdoctoral fellowship devoted to exploring the question of "the human" from all angles–and from a different angle each year.
For artists and humanists, these are extraordinary times: as the fate of our planet hangs in the balance, our sense of "the human" is undergoing remarkable challenges and transformations. How should we understand our relation to animal cognition, to artificial intelligence, to the biosphere, to disability, to prostheses, to genetics? Can research into our evolutionary inheritance actually help us understand how and why we create art and literature? Can we imagine a form of humanism in which the boundaries of the human are unclear and unstable? Artists, performers, and humanists must be central to these debates–and to every deliberation of what it means to be human.
All application materials must be received at this address by February 15, 2012:
The Institute for Arts and Humanities
Postdoctoral Fellowship Program
Penn State University
Ihlseng Cottage
University Park, PA 16802
For more information, call (814) 865-0495 or write to arts-humanities@psu.edu.
2011-12 IAH Fellows
Jennifer Rhee earned her Ph.D. from the Program in Literature at Duke University in 2010. Her dissertation is entitled “Anthropomorphic Attachments in U.S. Literature, Robotics, and Artificial Intelligence”; her research is distinguished by its extraordinary range and depth, from the early work of Alan Turing and the 1956 Dartmouth Artificial Intelligence Conference, to Japanese cultural representations of robots, to the works of roboticists including Rodney Brooks, Cynthia Breazeal, and David Hanson, to the work of novelist Philip K. Dick, futurist Ray Kurzweil, and performance artist Stelarc. We’re especially lucky that Jennifer will be here for (and will be happy to contribute to) events surrounding the School of Theatre’s spring production, for which Dan Carter has commissioned a new play by Anthony Clarvoe–a production inspired by Karl Capek’s R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots).
Kris Weller holds a Ph.D. in the History of Consciousness from the University of California Santa Cruz. Prior to beginning study at UCSC, she graduated from the joint degree program in Law and Women's Studies at the University of Cincinnati. Her doctoral research focused on the figure of the human in U.S. law, exploring how the relational aspects of the liberal subject work to exclude potential legal persons in order to maintain an illusory human ideal of independence and autonomy. Kris is currently finishing a postdoctoral fellowship at Duke University, where her research focuses on conceptions of the human in competing models of translational neurological research. Her postdoctoral project at IAH, “Humans on Earth: Planetary Hospice?” asks how understanding the intricacies of care giving and identity in cases of psychiatric disability might help humans learn to be more responsible inhabitants of the planet in this age of environmental change.
