| The
Humanities Center
Faculty Fellowship Competition
The Humanities Center sponsors an annual Faculty Fellowship
Competition on a specific theme. Fellowships provide Wayne State
University faculty with summer funding to help pay for expenses
related to their research projects including travel, research assistance,
salary and fringe benefits. All WSU full-time faculty in the humanities,
arts, and related disciplines are eligible to submit proposals,
except those who have received funding from the Center within the
last two years. Details on the 2009-2010 competition, on "The
Environment," can be found below. Recipients of awards for
the 2008-2009 competition on "Hauntings" have
now been announced.
2009-2010 Theme:
"The Environment"
Fifteen (15) copies of the application and
CV should be submitted to the Director, Humanities Center,
by 5:00 PM on April 3, 2009.
EXPLICATION:
From the cave paintings of early humans to the elaborate laboratory-like
zoological gardens in contemporary cities, nature and humans’
place in nature have preoccupied humanity. We measure ourselves
against nature; we create myths to explain natural phenomena; religions
begin in intense, visionary encounters with the natural Other; science
attempts to persuade us in the twenty-first century to begin to
see ourselves as part of nature, not as dominators or exploiters
of it.
The theological and classical views of humans as stewards of the
natural world as well as lords of creation began to give way to
more systematic approaches following the Copernican and Galilean
revolution: our entire planet was no longer
the center of the universe. The discovery of the microscope led
to advances in empirical science. Alexander von Humboldt’s
path-breaking scientific study of nature, the three-volume Personal
Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of America, 1799-1804,
was pivotal in engendering a new approach to nature. This work influenced
generations of naturalists, including the young Charles Darwin,
who sought to systematize both nature’s living and nonliving
productions and characterize the laws governing the natural world.
Humboldt’s portrayal of lands untouched by human presence
also stimulated a new genre of literary and artistic expression—the
wilderness romance and lyric meditation along with landscapes, prints,
and, by the 1840s, photographs depicting the romantic conception
of pristine nature. In the United States, Thoreau is often hailed
as the most notable progenitor of a new sense of environmental awareness,
addressing ideas of communion with nature, ecological relationships,
and the conservation of natural resources, expressed in Walden (1854)
and other writings. In the wake of the major assaults on the environment
produced by the Industrial Revolution, empire building and expansion,
and globalization, early twentieth-century naturalists, most notably
Aldo Leopold, offered less sanguine meditations on the human relationship
to nature, vigorously promoting activism in preserving and conserving
rapidly disappearing natural treasures. Yet as environmental historian,
Susan Flader , noted Leopold’s advocacy of “land husbandry”
or wilderness conservation in A Sand County Almanac (1949) “contains
no panaceas, no blueprints for mass action.” Moved by the
realization that birds were crucial to keeping in check pests that
destroyed agriculture, the Audubon society in the late nineteen
century began lobbying for bird preservation and protection. As
we devised other means of preventing harmful insects from competing
with us for crops, a new naturalism was born: Rachel Carson in her
classic work, Silent Spring (1962), attacked current “Stone
Age science” that would unquestioningly spread deadly DDT,
asking, “How could intelligent beings seek to control a few
unwanted species by a method that contaminated the entire environment
and brought the threat of disease and death even to their own kind?”
Carson’s warning channeled the outrage many felt at the continued,
mindless, and harmful exploitation of nature. She inspired the environmental
movement of the late twentieth century. Yet her message—promoting
an ethical, responsible and sustainable approach toward satisfying
human economic needs with the survival of species and of natural
resources—still meets with opposition and derision.
For the 2009 Faculty Fellows Competition, the Humanities Center
invites reflections on all past and present forms of cultural representations
of the human relationship to the environment—literary, artistic,
historical, economic, philosophical, political, journalistic, and
scientific. It also invites discussions of environmental activism
in all these fields.
The Faculty Fellowship awards grants of up to $6,000 for
summer salary, research assistants, travel or a combination of these.
Fifteen (15) copies of the application and CV should
be submitted to the Director, Humanities Center, by 5:00
PM on April 3, 2009.
The Humanities Center
Attn: Walter F. Edwards, Director
2226 Faculty/Administration Building
Wayne State University
Detroit, MI 48202
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