" It was an honor and a privilege to be part of the first cohort of visiting scholars at the James Weldon Johnson Institute. The genuine commitment to interdisciplinary study combined with the rich resources of Atlanta and Emory University made it an ideal place to conduct research on the black freedom movement. Every scholar should have the good fortune to work in such an intellectually stimulating and supportive environment. This year will stay with me for a long time to come."
Robbie Lieberman,
Southern Illinois University Carbondale
National Call for Applications The James Weldon Johnson Institute for Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies of Emory University invites applications for its Visiting Scholars Program whose focus is upon the modern civil rights movement. Supported by a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Visiting Scholars Program provides up to five fellowships for both junior and senior scholars and their career equivalents each academic year. We welcome applications from scholars in the humanities, the humanistic social sciences and law. We are interested in research projects in American Studies, African American Studies, English, Ethnic Studies, Gay and Lesbian Studies, History, Law, Music and Women’s Studies that examine the origins, evolution, impact and legacy of the modern civil rights movement from 1905, or the rise of the Niagara Movement, to the present. We also support research projects that examine the civil rights movement and its points of intersection with other social movements such as the Women’s Movement, the Lesbian, Gay, Bi-Sexual, Transgendered Movement, and the Human Rights Movement. Scholars will each teach one course in the spring semester. The deadline for applications is January 15, 2010. Notification of award is February 26, 2010. Visiting Scholars will be in residence at Emory’s Johnson Institute for the academic year 2010-2011. Candidates must hold a Ph. D. or a terminal degree in law at the time of application.
Program Structure Supported by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Visiting Scholars Program is the core program of the Johnson Institute. With its focus upon the modern civil rights movement from 1905 to the present, the Visiting Scholars Program is the first and only residential program of its kind in the nation. Within the framework of the Visiting Scholars Program, the modern civil rights movement is defined as beginning with the establishment of the Niagara Movement of 1905, a movement that defined itself in opposition to the policies of Booker T. Washington. The program supports new Ph.Ds, faculty members, and independent scholars with a distinguished record of research and undergraduate or graduate teaching in the humanities, the humanistic social sciences and law on the modern civil rights movement. The Visiting Scholars Program seeks to foster new research that examines the origins, evolution, impact and legacy of the modern civil rights movement as well as its impact upon other social movements in the United States and abroad. These social movements include but are not limited to the Women’s Movement, the Gay and Lesbian Movement and the Human Rights Movement. The JohnsonInstitute is committed to recruiting only the best and most promising scholars in civil rights. The expectation is that visiting scholars will complete a major work of scholarship that will assume the form of a monograph or other equally substantial forms of scholarship.
Beyond the Johnson Institute visiting scholars will have two institutional homes: Emory’s School of Law and one of five sponsoring departments. These departments are African American Studies, English, History, Music and the Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts. In designing the program, the leadership of the Johnson Institute considered carefully the complex and special needs of visiting scholars; a desire to maximize their productivity; and the opportunity to effectively use the resources resident at Emory University and in Atlanta, widely recognized as the spiritual home of the modern civil rights movement.
Faculty Hosts During the period of the residency, visiting scholars will be paired with faculty hosts from the five sponsoring departments and the School of Law. Faculty hosts constitute an important source of support and information for visiting scholars beyond the Johnson Institute. Faculty hosts are senior Emory faculty members who will work collaboratively with the director of the Johnson Institute in order to make the residencies of the visiting scholars productive and meaningful. Faculty hosts are the liaison between the Johnson Institute and colleagues in sponsoring departments as well as the School of Law who share the research interests of visiting scholars. Faculty hosts contribute to the realization of some of the important goals of the Visiting Scholars Program.
Teaching
While the Johnson Institute remains committed to supporting new research and scholarship on the modern civil rights movement, it is equally committed to the creation of new opportunities for learning for undergraduate and graduate students in this field. With the support and cooperation of the sponsoring departments and the School of Law, visiting scholars will teach one undergraduate or graduate course during the period of their residency. The visiting scholar hosted by the Department of African American Studies will have the opportunity to teach an undergraduate course composed of students enrolled at Spelman College and Emory College. All matters related to the advertisement, cross-listing, and the evaluation of courses will be administered by the sponsoring departments and the School of Law.
Monthly Colloquia
The monthly colloquia are the dynamic framework for the presentation of research by visiting scholars. The colloquia are sponsored by the Johnson Institute and Emory’s Center for Humanistic Inquiry. The objective of this structure is to cultivate the widest possible audience for the monthly colloquia, and to foster a multi-disciplinary and interdisciplinary dialogue. Equally important, this structure seeks to foster the creation of a community of scholars that includes the visiting scholars, the faculty and students of the sponsoring departments, the School of Law, along with other visiting scholars in residence at Emory University.
Faculty Seminar on Civil Rights
In order to strengthen and expand the community of scholars constituted by the Visiting Scholars Program, the Johnson Institute also sponsors a Faculty Seminar on Civil Rights. While the monthly colloquia are the framework within which visiting scholars present their research, the Faculty Seminar on Civil Rights is the forum in which they receive even deeper grounding in the field of civil rights. Meeting once during the period of the residency, the faculty seminar is the site for the presentation of perspectives and research on the modern civil rights movement by faculty in Emory College, the Candler School of Theology, and the School of Law. Presenters also include scholars beyond Emory who have shaped the discourse and research on civil rights through their scholarship. The faculty seminar also features presentations by practitioners and leaders within the modern civil rights movement. Beyond serving the vital function of enhancing their knowledge base, the Faculty Seminar on Civil Rights is yet another means of introducing visiting scholars to the many resources of Emory University. The seminar also fosters the creation of a broad community of scholars engaged in research on civil rights.
Eligibility
-
Ph.D. or a terminal degree in Law
-
U.S. citizenship or permanent resident status as of the application deadline
-
We do not support the completion of doctoral dissertations nor projects in creative writing. Scholars at the level of assistant professors may apply for one grant renewal. When applying for the renewal, scholars will compete for a fellowship among the new pool of applicants.
Award
-
$60,000 for full Professor and equivalent with benefits
-
$40,000 for Associate Professor and equivalent with benefits
-
$30,000 for Assistant Professor and equivalent with benefits
-
Period of Residency: one academic year
-
Application deadline: January 15, 2010
-
Notification of award: February 26, 2010
Application The application is comprised of the following materials, eight copies of each.
All applications must be mailed and postmarked by January 15, 2010:
research proposal (not to exceed four, double-spaced pages)
-
a curriculum vita
-
two letters of recommendation
-
two sample syllabi
-
a one-page teaching statement
-
Applications and letters of recommendation may be mailed to: The James Weldon Johnson Institute for Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies
Suite 412S
1256 Briarcliff Road
Emory University
Atlanta, GA 30306
Visiting Scholars 2009-2010
Dr. Trimiko Melancon is an Assistant Professor of English, Women’s Studies and Africana Studies at Auburn University. She earned her B.A. in English from Xavier University of Louisiana and her M.A. and Ph.D. in African American Studies from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her teaching and scholarly interests lie primarily in African American and American literature and culture; black feminist theory and criticism; critical race, gender, and sexuality studies; and African American and Black German Studies. An inaugural Visiting Scholar at the James Weldon Johnson Institute, Professor Melancon has been the J. William Fulbright Scholar of American Literature and American Studies in Berlin, Germany, a Mellon Mays University Fellow, and a Frederick Douglass Teaching Scholar. She has received grants and fellowships that have facilitated the continued support of her interdisciplinary research and teaching: from the Andrew W. Mellon, Woodrow Wilson, and Nellie Mae Foundations, as well as the Social Science Research Council. Her publications appear in African American Review, Callaloo, and the Encyclopedia of African American Women Writers. During her residency at the Johnson Institute, she is completing her manuscript Unbought and Unbossed: Transgressive Black Women and the Politics of Representation, which examines, through the trope of sexuality, post-civil rights novelists’ subversion of representations of black women in the American literary and cultural imagination.
Chandra Tyler Mountain is Associate Professor of English at Dillard University in New Orleans. She received her B.A. in English and Communications from Oakwood College in Huntsville, Alabama, and her M.A. and Ph.D in English from the University of Florida in Gainesville. Professor Mountain’s teaching and scholarly interests lie in African and Caribbean women’s literatures, American ethnic literatures, and feminist theories. Her current research, entitled Dead End Street: Reading the Signs, Hitting the Walls and Speaking Madness, explores madness in the writings of women of Africa and the African Diaspora, seeks to define it and advance a theoretical position on madness as a social text. The project uses Africana women’s literary texts: to provide an alternative and (Afri)woman-centered theory of madness; to elucidate representations of madness in Africana women’s texts; to examine the social and political contexts and experiences of Africana women and unveil the reasons for Black women’s literary madness; to reveal moments of connection and disconnection between women of Africa and women of the Diaspora and discuss how those connections and disconnections impact social, mental, emotional stability and discusses literary responses to Africana women’s madness. The full manuscript focuses on a narrow selection of novels by authors from West Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States. In most cases, individual chapters focus on literary texts either set in or by an author from each of the three areas and illuminates representations, manifestations, and activities of madness and “mad” characters in the literature of Africana women. Professor Mountain is in residence at the Johnson Institute under the auspices of the Faculty Residency Program.
Mab Segrest is currently Fuller-Maathai Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at Connecticut College in New London. She received her BA from Huntingdon College in Montgomery, Alabama, and her MA and PhD from Duke University in British and American Literature. She has worked as teacher, writer and organizer for over thirty years. She is author of My Mama’s Dead Squirrel: Lesbian Essays on Southern Culture; Memoir of a Race Traitor; and Born to Belonging: Writings on Spirit and Justice. Her current project, LUNACY ADMINISTRATION, focuses on the state mental hospital in Milledgeville, Georgia (by its own claims the largest in the world in the 1950s an 1960s with the largest graveyard of disabled people) and extends her intellectual work over the past three decades on Southern studies and on anti-racist, feminist and queer political movements. LUNACY ADMINISTRATION uses archival materials and oral history to explore the links between the African-American civil rights movement and the movement for the rights of psychiatric patients. The locale in Jim Crow Georgia of this gargantuan hospital – “American psychiatry writ large,” in the terms of psychiatric historian Edwin Shorter – foregrounds the role of race, gender, class and sexuality in the construction of mental illness and its treatments in state institutions that by mid-twentieth century became egregious violators of what were emerging in national and international law as civil and human rights. The recognition and response to the treatment of psychiatric patients in turn helped to produce and inform the resurgence of feminism, the early gay rights movement and the movement for disability rights. The history of the Milledgeville hospital makes clear that all of these movements had shared roots in anti-fascist modernity. The writings of Georgia liberation theologians Howard Thurman and Martin Luther King, JR, provide an alternative psychology of struggle and freedom that stands in dialectical relationship to the increasingly truncated versions of the “real,” the “sane,” and the “normal” in the diagnostic categories and treatments of hospitals such as Milledgeville.
William B. Turner is a leading authority on the history of the lesbian/gay/bisexual/trangender (LGBT) civil rights movement, having published an article in The Journal of Policy History on the statutory exclusion of lesbian/gay aliens from the United States from 1917 to 1990, and the chapter on lesbian/gay civil rights in the Carter and Reagan administrations in his co-edited volume, Creating Change: Sexuality, Public Policy, and Civil Rights, still virtually the only scholarly work on the topic. During his year at the Johnson Institute, he will investigate the connections and disconnections between the LGBT and the African American civil rights movements, primarily by examining the papers of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF) on microfilm. This research will materially advance Turner’s work on his next book, The New Civil Rights: Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgender Politics and Policy in the United States, 1973 to 2000. The NGLTF is the nation’s oldest LGBT civil rights organization, and has a long-standing commitment to anti-racist work as part of its mission. On one hand, many prominent African American leaders, including Coretta Scott King, Jesse Jackson, and Georgia’s own John Lewis, actively support LGBT civil rights as an extension of the African American civil rights movement. On the other hand, some prominent African Americans deplore such comparisons and more or less actively oppose LGBT civil rights. Conservative activists have deliberately encouraged African American hostility toward LGBT civil rights and activists.
States and abroad. These social movements include but are not limited to the Women’s Movement, the Gay and Lesbian Movement and the Human Rights Movement. The JohnsonInstitute is committed to recruiting only the best and most promising scholars in civil rights. The expectation is that visiting scholars will complete a major work of scholarship that will assume the form of a monograph or other equally substantial forms of scholarship. 
