Faculty Summer Fellowships: New Approaches to Meet the Moment

Eligibility

UW tenure-track faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences, whose research seeks to meet the moment.

Applicants who are interested in the Digital Humanities Summer Fellowship and the Themed Summer Fellowship may apply separately to both. In their proposal narratives, they should indicate which fellowship is their top priority and why.

Description

In the summer of 2026, the Simpson Center for the Humanities will convene a cohort of tenure-track faculty actively working on research projects that seek in some way – through their forms, methods, themes, arguments, or intended audiences – to meet our current historical moment.

We live in a moment of profound cultural transformations and political challenges. These times raise questions about core human values and what constitutes the greater good, questions well-suited for humanistic inquiry. These times are also encouraging humanities scholars, from diverse disciplines and researching a variety of historical periods, places, and cultures, to rethink the forms of their research, the audiences they seek to engage, and the institutions they want to inhabit and build.

This fellowship opportunity invites applicants to imagine anew why and how they generate humanities scholarship. It encourages experimentation and improvisation. By gathering scholars together who are working on projects in different disciplinary capacities, time periods, and languages but who share an explicit interest in speaking to our contemporary moment, we hope to foster fresh and sustained cross-disciplinary discussion.

This fellowship is open to faculty pursuing academic and public-facing scholarship, and working towards a variety of forms such as books, articles, essays, chapters in edited collections, interviews, videos, podcasts, and websites and database projects. We hope to award support to six faculty members total.

Projects may be independent or collaborative. Joint applications are welcome. For joint applications, we request separate complete proposal submissions from the two faculty members involved, and if the project is selected for support, we will award each of the applicants a full fellowship.

Criteria

The review committee will base its award decisions on the scholarly merit of the individual applications. Projects likely to contribute to intellectual exchange among a diverse group of colleagues are especially encouraged.

Preference will be given to faculty who have not received a Simpson Center Society of Scholars Fellowship, Digital Humanities Summer Fellowship, or Summer Book Fellowship in the past year.

Terms of Award, July Residency, and Campus Meetings

Each awardee will receive $10,000 in summer salary (plus benefits). The explicit intent of this support is to allow fellows to devote much of their work time during summer 2026 to their proposed projects. It is an expectation that fellows will not have significant competing work demands such as teaching during the month of July.

Award recipients are required to participate in person in all meetings of the summer fellowship cohort. Meetings will be held twice per week during the month of July. This fellowship is not appropriate for those who are unable to meet on campus during July 2026. Each fellow will be expected to make a presentation of their work and circulate a portion of it in advance of one of the meetings.

In addition, two gatherings will be held on campus in spring and fall, as a way of bookending the fellowship term. Please note that tentative dates for those meetings have been set as follows:

Introductory Meeting: Friday, May 29, 2026
Project Showcase: Friday, October 9, 2026