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.   2011-2012 included seminars on subjects such as “Nomadic Stages: On the Emergence of Literary Comedy in the Age of Enlightenment,” “Kinship is Mine: Toward A New Interpretation of South Indian Intermarriage,” “How Water and GPS Can Help Us Find Extra-Solar Planets,” “From Here to Eternity: Sovereignty and the Sacred in the Ottoman Balkans,” and “Yasujiro Ozu’s Late Spring.”   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 2012-2015 competition, we received 880 applications for five postdoctoral fellowships.

_{Daniel Sheffield, Yulia Ryzhik, Susan Stewart, Jie Li, Kate Liszka, Matthew McCarty}

Open Fellowship

Kate Liszka, Ph.D., Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations (Egyptology), University of Pennsylvania

Daniel Sheffield, Ph.D., Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University

Humanities Fellowship

Matthew McCarty, Ph.D., Archaeology, University of Oxford

Yulia Ryzhik, Ph.D., English, Harvard University

East Asian Studies Fellowship

Jie Li, Ph.D., East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University