Call for Applications for Postdoctoral Fellows - American University of Beirut: Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowships in the Arts and Humanities

Call for Applications for Postdoctoral Fellows - American University of Beirut: Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowships in the Arts and Humanities

Call for Applications for Postdoctoral Fellows - American University of Beirut: Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowships in the Arts and Humanities

By : Jadaliyya Reports

Center for Arts and Humanities (CAH)

The American University of Beirut invites applications for its Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowships in the Arts and Humanities, which begins in September 2019. The duration of appointment will be 10 months. Appointees will be attached to a relevant department and will be expected to remain in residence for the duration of the academic year.

The position is open to recent recipients of the PhD degree whose research and teaching interests involve one or more of the following disciplines:

Arabic (Mamluk or Ottoman Arabic Literature)

English (translation studies, world literature, and global theater/film)

Fine Arts and Art History (musicology, music performance, theater and art history)

Philosophy (Ancient Philosophy, Islamic Philosophy, Feminist Philosophy)

History and Archaeology (Natural sciences in Archaeology, Prehistory of the Levant, Islamic Archaeology, Egyptology)

Calls for Mellon postdoctoral fellows will focus on specific disciplines and departments that are likely to have permanent openings in the near future. These may occur as senior faculty retire; as new lines are created to reduce teaching loads; and as existing lines are redistributed after academic program reviews. However, while promising fellows will be urged to apply for openings that may arise in their areas of specialty, all positions must be filled through open searches in accordance with University policy.

Requirements:

  • Applicants must have received their doctoral degrees no later than 30 days and no earlier than five years prior to the appointment start date;
  • Applications must include the following:
  • Letter of interest;
  • Curriculum vitae;
  • Statement of research interests (2-3 pages), specifically, research to be undertaken during the fellowship and proposed research product;
  • Dissertation abstract or summary (1 page);
  • Samples of publications (or dissertation extracts)
  • Statement of teaching interests and experience;
  • Three letters of recommendation; sent to rb81@aub.edu.lb
  • Copy of official transcript or letter of confirmation from dissertation committee chair indicating that the degree will be granted by the appointment start date.


Individuals who have held other postdoctoral fellowships are not barred from applying.

Stipend, benefits, and other advantages and obligations of the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowships in the Arts and Humanities include:

  • Annual stipend of $45,000;
  • Co-pay health coverage under the University’s Health Insurance Plan;
  • Housing subsidy;
  • Teaching load of one course per semester;
  • Participation in the Arts and Humanities activities are required by the Center. 


Completed proposals should be submitted in one e-mail by close of business (5:00 p.m.) on January 15, 2019. 

Application material should be sent to: 

Submissions

The completed application should be submitted electronically and in one e-mail to Ms. Rita Bassil [rb81@aub.edu.lb] 

Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412