The Social Science Research Council is pleased to announce its Transregional Research Junior Scholar Fellowship funded with generous support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. These fellowships are aimed at supporting transregional research under the rubric InterAsian Contexts and Connections. Their purpose is to strengthen the understanding of issues and geographies that do not fit neatly into existing divisions of academia or the world and to develop new approaches, practices, and opportunities in international, regional, and area studies.

The intellectual thrust of the project will continue to be the reconceptualization of Asia as an interlinked historical and geographic formation stretching from West Asia through Eurasia, Central Asia, and South Asia to Southeast Asia and East Asia. Proposals submitted for the fellowship competition should bear upon processes that connect places and peoples across the boundaries of regions and countries (such as religion, migration, media, shared access to natural resources, cultural and economic continua, and resource flows), those that reconfigure local and translocal contexts (such as shifting borders, urbanization, and social movements), and those that are situated at the nexus of the global/regional/local (such as youth culture, tourist arts, illicit flows). The broad focus of the project is intended to advance transregional research as well as to establish structures for linking scholars across disciplines in the arts, the humanities, and the social sciences.

Select applicants will be invited to submit full narrative proposals in fall 2015, and fellowships will be awarded in February 2016. Fellowship funds will be disbursed flexibly over the eighteen-month period from February 2016 to August 2017.

These fellowships will continue to help junior scholars (those at the postdoctoral stage, one to five years out of the PhD) complete first books and/or undertake second projects. In addition to funding research, the fellowships will create networks and shared resources that will support fellows well beyond the grant period through intensive workshops and activities that promote transregional perspectives on individual campuses. The Transregional Research Junior Scholar Fellowship will thus provide promising scholars important support at critical junctures in their careers.

Applications and additional fellowship details, including former fellows’ research abstracts and answers to frequently asked questions, are available on the program website at
http://www.ssrc.org/fellowships/transregional-research-fellowship

For additional inquiries, please message: transregional@ssrc.org

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