Princeton University

Faculty are appointed fellows with a normal term of three years. (Obviously this time can be adjusted for sabbaticals and other events that punctuate faculty careers.) The duties of the faculty fellows are deliberately designed to be few and not too time consuming, in the hope that those duties can both be enjoyed and taken seriously.

The society holds six or seven dinners each year, generally on the third Monday of the month, and we ask that faculty members normally attend these dinners. At each dinner one faculty member gives a brief overview of a topic on which he or she is working, chosen for its interest to a general social science audience. Thus some time during the term of your fellowship, each faculty fellow is asked to give such a talk. We also hope that faculty fellows will participate in one further way: during the year, on the first Monday of each month and sometimes more often, a student presents portions of his or her thesis to other student fellows who gather for lunch. We ask that faculty fellows come to several of these lunches.

There is also an end of the year reception during which we come together to wish our graduate students well in their future careers and greet the new cohort of student fellows.

The process for choosing faculty fellows is rather informal. We are concerned with finding fellows who are interested in, and willing to comment on, a wide variety of social science thesis projects, and who have projects of their own that they would be willing to present to the group at a dinner meeting.

The task involves a willingness to communicate one’s own work in ways that are accessible to a broad audience of highly selected social science graduate students. A second crucial selection criterion is that the faculty member be able to commit to attending many of the scheduled events of the society described above. 

If you know a faculty member who you think would be interested in this activity, e-mail a paragraph about him or her to sparoly@princeton.edu. If you would yourself be interested, e-mail a note about that. 

The departments from which the fellows generally come are: the Woodrow Wilson School, economics, psychology, sociology, politics, history, anthropology, religion and architecture. However, we would welcome fellows from other departments and units as well.