Postdoctoral Fellowship 2025-2026: Life/Story

Overview

Who We Are

The Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry (FCHI) is Emory University's hub for the Humanities, advancing research, writing, and creative works among faculty research fellows, postdoctoral fellows, PhD completion fellows and undergraduate honors research fellows. The Center convenes scholars across a wide range of disciplines, methods, and modes of creative practice, fostering individual and collaborative research as well as public engagement. We are dedicated to rigorous humanistic inquiry and an engaged intellectual community which reaches beyond the walls of the Center.

Our Mellon-funded publishing initiative amplifies humanistic research through support for the open access publication of new monographs and events that bring authors into meaningful conversations with their audiences.

Each year the Center anchors its programming and recruitment of Fellows around a central theme. For this academic year, our theme will be Democracy: Past, Present, Future.

What We Do

The FCHI is a focal point for humanities endeavors at Emory University and serves to advance research and teaching, overall, in the humanities. The FCHI serves both those trained in the humanities and also others in the University who are interested in humanistic issues. The FCHI is dedicated to providing occasions and spaces for encouraging intellectual community and scholarship across disciplines.

In addition to offering broad general support to those engaged in humanistic research across the University, the FCHI runs an annual residential Fellows program to support immersive, long form humanistic scholarship. The Fellows Program welcomes Senior Fellows from Emory's tenured faculty and faculty visiting from Atlanta area institutions,  Emory Undergraduate Honors Fellows and Dissertation Completion Fellows, as well as Post-Doctoral Fellows selected from other institutions.  Fellows enjoy an academic year of research and scholarship, intellectual engagement and programs focused on the annual theme. FCHI Fellows take active roles in the life of the Fox Center and in the intellectual life of the larger University. The Fox Center is a hub for the development of novel methodologies, digital scholarship and publishing, and innovative interdisciplinary approaches to humanistic work and public engagement.

Postdoctoral Fellow in Poetics

The Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry is pleased to open applications for our one-year postdoctoral research fellowships. We invite applications from candidates from any humanistic discipline who are eager to be part of a community of scholars engaged in innovative and interdisciplinary research and conversations around our 2025-26 theme, Life/Story.

The Fox Center will appoint up to four postdoctoral fellows for the academic year 2025-26. Three positions are open field and one is in the field of poetics. Our postdoctoral fellowship in poetics reflects the importance of Emory’s Stuart A. Rose Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Book Library as a center for research in poetry.

Fellows will participate in a weekly interdisciplinary seminar, presenting their research at one of these meetings, and will teach one undergraduate course of their own design in the College of Arts and Sciences. They will also collaborate in the planning of Fox Center programming pertaining to the theme and engage in the Center's events.

Life/Story

How do the humanities capture a life, and in what ways does this genre—the craft of unearthing and rendering a life story—shed light upon key moments in time, social and political movements, critical junctures in history, or elements fundamental to a particular culture and place? How are different methodologies and epistemologies mobilized in telling the story of a life that also offer broad social and political commentaries? How does a single biography, in any medium, shed light upon central themes of the human condition?

We invite scholars whose research interests are resonant with such a panoramic view of “writing” a life. We envision that fellows may pursue research employing a range of historical, contemporary, social, cultural, artistic, and philosophical approaches to capturing a life, including but not limited to oral and archival histories, ethnography, philosophy, creative writing and film.

Eligibility

_You can learn more about this opportunity by visiting the funder's website._