2009-10 Fellowships

Empire, Sovereignty, Migration, and Diaspora:
Transnational America from Above and Below

[ Click here for Fellowship Application ]

The Charles Warren Center, Harvard's American history research center, invites applications from historians and scholars in related disciplines to a workshop on “Empire, Sovereignty, Migration, and Diaspora: Transnational America from Above and Below.”  The workshop will be led by Vincent Brown and Walter Johnson of the Harvard University History Department. By construing the terms "empire," "sovereignty," "migration," and "diaspora" as broadly as possible, the workshop aims to convene a conversation between areas of inquiry conventionally pursued along separate pathways: between studies shaped around the question of imperial power and those concerned with subaltern politics, to be sure; but also between African American Studies, Native American Studies, Asian American Studies and Latino Studies.  The workshop will develop a global, imperial, and national account of the historical coordinates of migration, immigration, and diaspora in United States history, mapping the patterns traced by commercial, military, and legal power alongside the movements of people, their ideas, and their political struggles.  Participants will consider the ambivalent alliances and incommensurable categories of belonging that have emerged from the overlapping, amalgamating, and diverging historical experiences of various groups within (and outside of) U.S. history.  In this way, the workshop will provide an occasion for scholars working in various traditions to reflect upon the embeddedness of their categories of inquiry in the very history of empire and identity formation they seek to represent.  The workshop is still in development; interested scholars will want to check for changes to this description in summer 2008.

Warren Fellows participate in a seminar led by the workshop co-directors, presenting their work and discussing that of invited speakers.  Applicants may not be degree candidates and should have a Ph.D. or equivalent.  Fellows are Harvard University members with library access, and receive a private office which they must use for at least the nine-month academic year.  Stipends are individually determined in accordance with each fellow's needs and the Center's resources.  The Center encourages applications, otherwise consistent with the Workshop theme, relating to the nation's life during and as a consequence of wars, and from qualified applicants who can contribute, through their research and service, to the diversity and excellence of Harvard's academic community.