The date to apply for the 2021-2022 fellowships has passed. Applications for the next years’ fellowship (2022-2023) will be open in the spring of 2022.
The Interdisciplinary Humanities Research Seminar sponsored by the Oklahoma Center for the Humanities at The University of Tulsa is intended to promote engaged, intellectual discussion on topics of current public and intellectual interest.
Every year, a group of approximately eight Research Fellows will be chosen to collaborate on a series of weekly seminar discussions. It is hoped that these discussions will then lead into further projects, undertaken collectively or individually. These might include magazine articles, creative works, digital projects, educational initiatives, or efforts designed to spur civic action and participation. TU students, faculty members, and members of the wider Tulsa community are all eligible to apply. The admissions committee will judge applications based on assessment of the proposal’s connection to the topic and potential for sparking dialogue among the seminar’s members.
Interdisciplinary Humanities Research Seminar on Renewal and Recovery: 2021-2022
We have endured a battering year of plague and protest, distance and death, change and anxiety. Even our most enduring social patterns have become different, strange, and disorienting: celebrating a birthday, seeing someone in public without a mask, or settling in for a day’s work or school alone in front of a tiny camera. In our politics, we now look at each other with growing suspicion as we grapple with the aftermath of a violent insurrection that laid siege to the seat of our democracy. We find ourselves flooded with information from all sides and awash in a seemingly endless cascade of crises: racial injustice, accelerating climate change, and the yawning disparities in wealth, education, and health laid bare by the ravages of the pandemic.
Our era is not the first to face such extremities since change itself is an integral part of all existence. “Human beings,” Goethe wrote amid the chaos of his own era, “renew and rejuvenate ourselves through change; otherwise we harden.” Throughout the 2021-22 academic year, the Oklahoma Center for the Humanities will explore the process of change, renewal, and recovery. This will mean looking to the past, crossing cultural boundaries, forcing new connections, and imagining alternative futures for ourselves, our communities, and our planet.