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Residential Research Fellowships Residential research groups (RRGs) are at the heart of UCHRI's activities, convening key scholars to work in collaboration on interdisciplinary topics of special significance. UCHRI promotes new scholarship in the humanities by fostering collaborative inquiry outside institutional and disciplinary structures. RRGs are in essence teams of researchers, often unknown to each other before residency, and assembled to work on a commonly defined research agenda. They are composed of a range of UC faculty, visiting scholars (including UC postdoctoral scholars), UC doctoral students, and non-UC faculty as resources allow. RRGs are developed through a two-stage process. First, research topics for RRGs are determined by open competition or by UCHRI in consultation with its Advisory Board and UC leaders in the humanities. Through a competitive review process, RRG fellows are then selected based on their ability to contribute to the research agenda of the group. Collaboration may take many forms. In communicating across disciplines, there are challenges of language, terminology, and methodology for all RRGs. The organizing premise of the residential research program is that when those challenges are surmounted, breakthroughs in knowledge are possible. An expected outcome of an RRG is the publication of a volume or an equivalent project arising from research pursued at UCHRI. UCHRI's facilities for participating scholars include private offices with e-mail/Internet access, seminar and conference rooms, a multi-media room, and a reference library. Furnished apartments are provided free of charge to fellows by the Institute for use on an as-needed basis during their residencies, resources permitting. [Back to UCHRI program overview]
Academic Year 2010-11
HOLY WARS REDUX
Convener:
Composed in collaboration with: Deadline: April 15, 2010
UC faculty receiving UCHRI Fellowships continue to obtain full salary from their home campuses. Faculty fellows supplement UCHRI support with sabbatical credits, grants, or other paid leave: 3 quarter credits for a one-quarter group. For UC faculty on a semester system, 2 sabbatical credits per semester in residence are required. Faculty RRG Fellowships may be held only once in a four-year period and twice every seven years. During fellows' stay at Irvine, UCHRI's facilities for participating scholars include private offices with e-mail/internet access, seminar and conference rooms, a multi-media room, and a reference library. Furnished apartments will be provided free of rental and utility charge to fellows by the institute for use on an as-needed basis during their residencies. Awards are contingent upon available funding. Faculty from outside of the University of California are regularly invited to participate in some manner in RRG projects, although residential fellowships for non-UC faculty are available only as resources allow. If a faculty member whose work could contribute to a residence group is unable to apply for a residential fellowship at UCHRI, the faculty member is encouraged to write to UCHRI Director David Theo Goldberg, who will make the individual's work and interest known to the group. Non-resident scholars can be included in the group's work as invited lecturers or under some other mutually acceptable arrangement. Awards will be announced in May 2010.
Applications consist of a Word document (please click here for downloading the template) and an abbreviated curriculum vitae. Both should be electronically submitted as attachments to Dante Noto at dnoto@hri.uci.edu. Holy Wars Redux has a twin focus. Our first aim is to re-examine the ontological and epistemological status of the historical holy wars known as the Crusades and Counter-Crusades: evaluating claims that the Crusades were defensive wars ab origo as well as claims that they were an expression of Western expansionism, an expansionism also detectable-it is said-in the aggressive 11th century spread of northwestern Europeans known as Normans westward, and southward, to England, southern Italy, Sicily, and the Byzantine empire. We are particularly interested in the status of arguments that posit a clash of early empires-the Islamic empire, the Latin Christian West, Byzantium-and the refiguration of that earlier "clash" in geopolitical culture and politics today. We will investigate how the medieval is re-inscribed in later time in ways that facilitate the entrenchment of sociopolitical agendas articulated in grands récits like the "clash of civilizations," the "rise of the West," etc. Our second aim is to bring together political and social scientists, Middle Eastern studies scholars, international relations analysts, social and cultural theorists, and religious studies researchers on the subject of holy wars today. In a collaboration traversing the humanities and social sciences, we should like to examine heterogeneities in the Islamic world, and varieties of Western and Islamic response-cultural, political, social, multi-media, digital, pedagogical-to the incidence of holy wars. Our group will analyze how foundationalist narratives arise, and what their enabling historiographies, asymmetries, teleologies, and logics might be. We are open to scholars focusing on any region of the world, and on any communities, societies, and groups. We will also investigate the odd phenomenon of rhetorical and epistemological convergence between opposite camps of the geopolitical spectrum. Examples continue to emerge, but perhaps the last decade's two most infamously striking examples were ex-president Bush's call for a "US 'Crusade' against Terrorism" (New York Times, 9/17/01; St Petersberg Times, 9/19/01, inter alia), and Osama Bin Laden's queerly mimed vision of a crusading West (see, e.g., "Bin Laden Tape Condemns West's 'Crusader Wars' (The Independent, 4/24/06). One of our hypotheses is that the rhetoric of holy wars-in the medieval past and today-requires the instantaneous collapse of interpretation for all involved: the political making of the figural into the literal, so that the meaning of signs and omens, and the will of God and the state, is fully transparent. Another hypothesis is that the "medieval" is not merely a historical category that names a temporal interval, but also a transhistorical category that can be repeatedly resurfaced and operationalized in later time, to render postmedieval and contemporary time non-identical to itself in ways that facilitate the agendas of different-including opposed and polarized-constituencies. In addition to the programmatic activities usually attached to residential seminars at the UCHRI (conference, workshop, books) we propose an additional new component: a data mining and visualization project utilizing high-performance computing (HPC) to test some of our hypotheses, arguments and conclusions, as these are shaped in the course of the residency. Two supercomputing centers, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) are interested in collaborating with us to explore computational algorithms for analyzing a range of databases to test the thinking that develops in our residency, and to visualize the results in ways that facilitate public dissemination. |