Since 2004, the Center for the Humanities, in collaboration with the College of Arts & Sciences, has offered research fellowships to senior tenured faculty from Boston University. All BUCH fellowships are one semester in length. Senior research fellows receive one semester’s leave of absence at full salary. The Center provides their departments with course replacement funds for two courses per faculty member. In 2007, these fellowships were named in honor of former CAS Dean Jeffrey Henderson, who helped to make them possible.
The Center for the Humanities Executive Committee reads the applications and selects the fellows. Applications are judged on the basis of their intellectual quality and scholarly significance, as well as on their direct relevance to the humanities.
The annual HSRF application deadline, including letters of recommendation, is October 15.
Defining the Humanities
The Center defines the humanities both as designated departments and as an expansive and flexible mode of inquiry. In keeping with the Congressional Act that created the NEH, the humanities include the study and interpretation of the following: linguistics; literature; history; philosophy; archaeology; comparative religion; ethics; the history, criticism and theory of the arts; those aspects of social sciences that have humanistic content and employ humanistic methods; and the study and application of the humanities to the human environment with particular attention to reflecting our diverse heritage, traditions, and history and the relevance of the humanities to the current conditions of life. We understand humanities methods as primarily critical or speculative, as distinguished from the empirical approaches of the natural and social sciences. We welcome faculty who share an interest in issues of interpretation and value that are central to humanities work.
Eligibility
Strong applicants are not only exemplary scholars but exemplary colleagues, as award recipients are expected to participate actively in the life of the Center through our Fellows Seminar. To this end, strong applicants will have served as full-time faculty members at BU for several years and will have made significant contributions to their departments both as scholars and colleagues.
Applications should demonstrate productive use of previous leaves. Be sure to note any prior BUCH-supported leaves in your application, and double check your eligibility if you have held an HSRF in the past (see eligibility requirements below). Please mention all supported leaves on your CV.
Projects under consideration should be well beyond the preliminary stages.
Further Considerations
Participation in the Community:
The BUCH Fellows Seminar, which brings together HSRFs, Junior Faculty Fellows, and Graduate Dissertation Fellows supported by the Center, forms the core of our intellectual community and allows for a more formal exchange of ideas. We require all fellows to participate in the Fellows Seminar for one semester, normally the semester in which the fellowship is held. Fellows whose research requires them to be abroad usually participate in the seminar during their first year back from leave. In recent years, each semester has featured between six and eight seminar meetings, depending on the number of fellows. We also encourage fellows to use the offices provided at the Center, which will allow them to interact with other members of the cohort.
External Funding:
Applicants must make at least one good faith application for outside funding and list those grants for which they are applying on the HSRF application. If a faculty member is chosen as a Henderson Fellow and that person’s application for outside funding is also successful, our normal expectation is that the applicant will accept the outside award and decline the HSRF. This will allow the Center to fund a colleague named as an alternate. In terms of external applications, note that the NEH deadline is roughly 4-6 months earlier (April of the prior academic year) than other deadlines.
Please note that the faculty member is responsible for determining that the external funding for which they apply can provide an adequate salary replacement during the requested leave time. For this reason, faculty are advised to pay close attention to the CAS Salary Gap Compensation policy available on the relevant page of the CAS faculty-staff handbook. In particular, the Suzy Newhouse Fellowship at Wellesley College is a program for which CAS no longer provides full top-off due to the small amount of funding this program provides.
Faculty with questions about salary gap compensation are welcome to consult with Associate Dean of Faculty in the Humanities Alice Tseng at aytseng@bu.edu.
CAS Paperwork:
Each faculty member applying for an HSRF must also submit Sabbatical/Leave of Absence paperwork to CAS. The deadline for submission of CAS Sabbatical/LOA paperwork to the Faculty Actions Office is December 2; departments, which submit all such applications as a group, will want these materials earlier. All requests for leave and sabbatical are subject to approval by the dean.
Application Components
Application Timeframe:
The annual HSRF application deadline is October 15.
Application:
Applications must include the following:
- Completed online application. Please create a draft form of your application as early as possible by filling in your name and the title of your project (application title); this will allow you to request the three confidential letters of recommendation (see below). Please note that you will be entering the three external recommenders’ names in two places.
- A description of your research project modeled on what you will be submitting for external fellowships, double-spaced, with page numbers, and no longer than 3,000 words. This project description will be assessed by senior faculty from many different fields in the humanities and should include a realistic estimate of what aspect or stage of the project you would work on or complete during the award period. You should also comment on how your project contributes to your specific field and to ongoing discussions in the humanities more generally. You must include a select bibliography, which does not factor into the word count.
- Current CV (4-page maximum). Be sure to indicate all supported leaves.
- The names of three senior scholars outside the University whom you have already asked to write confidential evaluations of your project. Once you input your recommenders’ email addresses and click “Send Request,” InfoReady Review will generate and send an individual link to each recommender. Each recommender will then submit their confidential letter via their individual link. Please send these requests to your recommenders well in advance of the deadline.
Preferred browser is Chrome. Please do not use Safari.
Updated Sept 3, 2024