NYU Humanities Council - Workshop Application Information

The Humanities Council envisions a workshop as a carefully planned series of meetings on a focused topic, bringing together faculty and graduate students from diverse disciplines.

Application deadline: December 1, 2005

Download Printable Version of Application (PDF)

Call For Proposals
Pilot-Study Workshops
Application
Sample Budget
Submitting Your Application

Call For Proposals

The Humanities Council exists to foster interdisciplinary exchange on the topics of the humanities across all departments and schools within NYU. The Council proposes to further this goal by supporting a number of Humanities Council Workshops on topics in the humanities where interdisciplinary approaches are likely to be particularly fruitful. A suitable topic might be a central subject within one of the humanities, one for which interdisciplinary approaches have been underdeveloped; or it might be a topic regarded as being at the edges of one of the humanities, where the results of another discipline are manifestly relevant to progress.

A workshop is a carefully planned, idea-driven series of meetings or events on a focused topic. Participants in the workshop are expected on occasion to have read specified literature, or seen certain performances or sites in advance, and normally to have made a commitment to participating in discussion and in the continuing series of meetings.Workshops might meet once every two or three weeks. Participants, who should be predominantly from the NYU community (including visiting scholars), will be regarded as potential speakers to the workshop. The Council intends that the more active structures of a workshop will lead some participants to bring insights from interdisciplinary discussion and reflection to bear on their own work. Some workshops that turn out to be particularly successful may later form the basis of new courses, team-taught by members of more than one department or school. Some may lead to the publication of new volumes of essays, or to a conference.

The Council expects graduate students, including those from the professional schools, to be actively involved in the selected workshops and that graduate students will contribute at least a quarter of the presentations in the second semester of a workshop. Graduate students may also be involved in such matters as literature searches and the coordination of a workshop. The proposed budget for a workshop may include some element of support for a graduate student carrying out an intellectually significant function for the workshop. The Council believes that active participation in a successful workshop will have many educational benefits for a graduate student.

A topic that is itself in the humanities may intersect with issues in the sciences and in the professional schools of NYU. Workshops with codirectors drawn from areas outside the humanities are thus welcome. Applicants may also want to time workshops to take advantage of distinguished visitors to the NYU campus. For many workshops, it will be appropriate to invite participants from outside NYU. For workshops involving the arts, it may be appropriate to involve a wider public.

The Council aims to provide financial support for between five and ten such workshops, with a maximum level of funding for any one workshop of $10,000 per year. Fruitful ideas about interdisciplinary work on a given topic may be at varying stages of development. The scale of a workshop may vary correspondingly, from a one-semester plan, which would be appropriate to an initial exploration of some interdisciplinary topic, to a four-semester plan suitable for an interdisciplinary topic for which it is already clear that a much larger enterprise is desirable. The Council will fund any one workshop up to at most two semesters. If they are conceptualized for longer, the Council will consider a request for renewal in funding at the end of the two semesters.

Workshops will be provided with Web resources through the humanities computing unit within the NYU Academic Computing Services. The Humanities Council portion of the NYU Web site will be developed to act as a portal, giving access to specific Web pages associated with each workshop. The programs, reading lists, performances, sites and other information for each workshop will be made available on these pages.

The codirectors of a workshop will be expected to send a written report to the Humanities Council at the end of its first year of operation, or at the end of the first semester of operation in the case of a one-semester workshop. Any continuing funding for a workshop will be dependent upon receipt by the Council of a satisfactory report, together with a proposal for the succeeding year. Workshop grants are intended as seed funding; approved proposals will be renewed only once and not on an ongoing basis.

Pilot-Study Workshops

The Council recognizes that some topics may merit an exploratory, pilot-study workshop, intended to investigate whether a regular, full-scale workshop would be fruitful. In such cases, the Council will be prepared to award pilot-study grants of up to $2,500.

Application

Applications for funding are invited from full-time faculty members in any school of NYU. An application should contain the following:

2. Specification of the topic of the proposed workshop and of the leading ideas and questions unifying the workshop, together with a statement of why the topic is amenable to interdisciplinary treatment (1,500 words or less).

3. Outline of proposed activities of the workshop over the course of its proposed duration (including, where appropriate, reading lists and other relevant materials).

4. A list of core participants (and their affiliations) from NYU and other institutions.

5. Statement of the number of semesters (one or two) for which funding is being requested.

6. Letters of support from the co-directors’ deans.

7. Budget (see sample)

For assistance in preparing the budget, consult your departmental budget administrator, your dean's office, or your school's office of funded research.

Submitting Your Application

Application Deadline: December 1, 2005

Completed applications should be sent electronically in the form of a Word document attachment; and letters of support from the deans to the applicant should also be forwarded to: asya.berger@nyu.edu

Questions regarding proposals are welcome, and should be addressed to Asya Berger at (212) 998-2196; fax (212) 995-4101; or e-mail asya.berger@nyu.edu.

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