Andrew W. Mellon Fellowships in the Humanities

For nine consecutive years, The Center for the Humanities has awarded two full-time residencies supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation along with eight course release-time fellowships and two dissertation fellowships to develop interdisciplinary working groups on various themes in the humanities. These groups provide CUNY faculty members and advanced graduate students with much-needed space and time to exchange ideas, share their work in an open setting, and participate in collaborative projects with colleagues whose research and writing is motivated by different perspectives and methodologies. The theme for the 2010-2011 Mellon Fellowships was "Emotion," and the theme for the ongoing 2011-12 Mellon Fellowships is "Freedom."

The Center for the Humanities is happy to announce the theme for our 2012-2013 Mellon Seminar in the Humanities: “Poverty.”

How can the humanities contribute to a better understanding of poverty? Definitions of poverty abound, but often depend upon systems of equivalence and measures of purchasing power that fail to capture the complicated state of being that human poverty represents. For instance, while the latest economic downturn in the United States has brought poverty quite literally to the table for an unprecedented number of Americans, efforts to grasp or measure this reality too often fail to reflect the precarious experience of many millions who have suffered deprivation, social exclusion and economic oppression for untold generations, both in the United States and around the world. How might this example point to a “poverty of empathy,” or a “poverty of imagination” on the part of the powerful, or even the academic, on a global scale? Alternately, how do evocations of sympathy, charity and pity in academic and political discourses create or reinforce social division globally? What are the political and social implications of defining poverty as a lack of (human and natural) resources or cultural capacities? How have race, gender, and culture informed explanations of poverty as either an individual and behavioral problem or a result of systemic failure? Is the very definition, categorization, and analysis of "the poor" problematic? When and why did the concept of "poverty" emerge historically? How is this emergence tied to notions of private property, wage labor, and standards of living and how has it changed over time to effect political and labor organizing? How does autonomy, self-sufficiency, or collective ownership complicate definitions of poverty? Poverty, like all terms which signify a state of social being, is defined and delimited by its obverse. But what is that obverse? Sufficiency, plenitude, excess? What new lessons are we learning about long-held beliefs around materialism and its link to power and poverty? 

We invite CUNY scholars who have found an understanding of poverty to be central to their work—from literature, politics, philosophy, classics, sociology, psychology, religious studies, history, anthropology, and media and communication studies and related fields and their interstices—to apply for participation in a year-long seminar. The applications are due by 5pm on Friday, February 10th, 2012. For the application form, click here.