Our fellows are paired with mentors outside of the fellows’ home discipline; the selection committee takes some pride in matching successful applicants with appropriate mentors on campus. While applicants should have a sense of the discipline or disciplines into which they need to extend their expertise, they are not asked to identify or contact a mentor.
You should address your cover letter either to the Selection Committee or to Professor Joseph Loewenstein, Director of Modeling Interdisciplinary Inquiry.
The Selection Committee changes from year to year, but it includes senior faculty from the humanities and interpretive social sciences. You should not expect that your file will be reviewed by faculty from your home discipline, although they may be consulted: expect a reading from curious, rigorous faculty who may not have expertise in your field.
As the name implies, this is an interdisciplinary fellowship. Successful applicants will have a disciplinary home in the humanities or interpretive social sciences, though their disciplinary extensions may take in the arts, natural sciences, or “hard” social sciences.
Each year the timeline is slightly different. The Selection Committee will aim to inform applicants about the current timeline by mid-February.
Yes. Each year, in addition to the annual salary, fellows are awarded a set amount of funds for research expenses and travel.
This is a residential fellowship and fellows are expected to meet regularly with their mentors, to participate in campus intellectual life, and to log plenty of office and library time. Fellows meet regularly with the MII Director, but there is no formal reporting system.
Modeling Interdisciplinary Inquiry fellows are housed in the Interdisciplinary Project in the Humanities (IPH), an academic unit that offers an undergraduate major, two minors, and a graduate certificate. Courses offered by the MII fellows are often hosted by IPH.
Fellows may teach in their home disciplines, but are encouraged to teach across disciplines (through IPH) or in their “aspirational” discipline. The fellowship is meant to enable ambitious scholars in early career to develop disciplinary and methodological bona fides beyond the area of their primary doctoral training. Fellows sometimes offer courses pitched to first-year undergraduates, more advanced undergraduates courses, and a theory and methods course pitched to advanced undergraduates and graduate students.
The Theory and Methods seminar is a course in critical theory and scholarly methods for advanced undergraduates and graduate students. Most of the students who will take the course will be ambitious undergraduate juniors who are in the early stages of work on a substantial interdisciplinary thesis project (the specific development of which is managed in a different course). Because those students are working on a variety of projects each of which straddles disciplines, the Theory and Methods course should be both rigorous and encompassing. (The course often also enrolls beginning graduate students from various humanities departments, who are seeking exposure to critical theory and methods not specified to their home discipline.) The course can have a thematic focus, but not one that would substantially narrow its utility or appeal to a range of potential students.
By “a short syllabus,” we mean a solid sketch, with a sense of what the core readings — and, perhaps, the central written assignments — would be. Applicants need not prepare a detailed syllabus, with all the attendant exhortations to students.
Have more questions? Email us at mii@wustl.edu.