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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 2008-2009 included seminars on subjects such as "Trick or Truth?  Managing the Meaning of Illusion in Christian Magic," "Leonardo, Michelangelo, and the Paragraph that Almost Ate the Book," "In Medias Res: World Literature as The Tale of Genji (Present, Past, Future)," and "Stealing the Show: African American Performance and Mediation in 1930s Hollywood."  In addition, Fellows organized a workshop on "New Directions in Tibetan Literary Studies" and an interdisciplinary discussion on the economy, attended a fall reception, readings of new fiction and poetry, and participated in a celebration of the Society’s tenth anniversary in May 2009. 

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 and several Princeton academic programs and faculty:   Humanities Council (Behrman and Perkins Fellowships in 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) and Peter Schäfer (Judaic Studies);  and the Department of Astrophysical Sciences (Russell and Spitzer Fellowships).

For the 2009-2012 search we received 930 applications for five postdoctoral fellowships.