Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts

The Princeton Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts, comprised of recent Ph.D. recipients in the humanities and selected social and natural sciences, seeks to promote innovative interdisciplinary approaches to scholarship and teaching.  Fellowships are awarded to candidates who are at the beginning of their academic career and have already demonstrated both outstanding scholarly achievement and excellence in teaching. Three to five postdoctoral fellows are appointed each year for three-year terms in residence to pursue research and teach half-time in their academic host department, in the Program in Humanistic Studies, or in other university programs. The total number of postdoctoral fellows is between 12 and 15. The fellowships carry with them an appointment as Lecturer in the fellow's host department.  Fellows are provided with a shared office, a personal computer, a research account and access to university grants, benefits and other resources.

The Cotsen Postdoctoral and Faculty Fellows meet for social and intellectual events that include a weekly seminar which fellows are expected to attend regularly, and where they present their work-in-progress.   Events in 2010-2011 included seminars on subjects such as “Making Ruins";  “Of Humans and Non-Humans: Perspectives from Science and Technology Studies”; “ Tonality as a Colonizing Force in Africa”; “ Politics of the Imaginary: Rhetoric and Propaganda in Byzantium.”   In addition, the Society sponsored lectures on the arts, readings of new fiction and poetry, and informal lunches with visiting scholars in the humanities.

The Society gratefully acknowledges the generous sponsorship of fellowships by Charter Trustee Lloyd E. Cotsen, and additional fellowships by the family of A.William Haarlow III '63 as well as several Princeton academic programs and faculty members: The Humanities Council (Behrman, Perkins Fellowships and The Cone Fund for the Humanities); Fund for Reunion (LGBT Studies); President and Dean of the Faculty at Princeton University (Race and Ethnicity Studies); Programs in East Asian Studies, Hellenic Studies, Judaic Studies, Latin American Studies; the Woodrow Wilson School (International Development); Woodrow Wilson Foundation (Link Fellowship); Mellon Foundation through grants to Professors Anthony Grafton (History of the Book), Peter Schäfer (Judaic Studies) and Ben Elman (East Asian Studies); and the Department of Astrophysical Sciences (Russell, Spitzer, and NSF Fellowships).

For the 2011-2014 competition, we received 890 applications for five postdoctoral fellowships.

_{L to R: Hannah Freed-Thall, Joel Lande, Susan Stewart, Tey Meadow, Ellen Lockhart, Douglas Jones}

Open Fellowship

Ellen Lockhart, Ph.D., Musicology, Cornell University

Fellowship in Humanistic Studies

Joel Lande, Ph.D., Germanic Studies, University of Chicago
Hannah Freed-Thall, Ph.D., Comparative Literature, University of California, Berkeley

Fellowship in LGBT Studies

Tey Meadow, Ph.D., Sociology, New York University

Fellowship in Race and/or Ethnicity Studies

Douglas Jones, Ph.D., Drama and Humanities, Stanford University