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 Gay and Lesbian Movement and the Human Rights Movement. The deadline for applications is January 15, 2009. Notification of award is February 16, 2009. Visiting Scholars will be in residence at Emory’s Johnson Institute for the academic year 2009-2010.
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 Johnson Institute 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 comprised of students enrolled at Morehouse College, 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. With the support of the sponsoring departments and the School of Law, we expect that visiting scholars will enjoy high enrollments in their courses.
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, the sponsoring departments of Emory University, Morehouse College and Spelman College. The objective of this structure is to cultivate the widest possible audience for the monthly colloquia. 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 and the Atlanta University Center.
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
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Ph.D. or a terminal degree in Law
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U.S. citizenship or permanent resident status as of the application deadline
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We do not support the completion of doctoral dissertations nor projects in creative writing.
Award
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$60,000 for full Professor and equivalent with benefits
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$40,000 for Associate Professor and equivalent with benefits
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$30,000 for Assistant Professor and equivalent with benefits
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Period of Residency: one academic year
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Application deadline: January 15, 2009
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Notification of award: February 16, 2009
Application The application is comprised of the following materials, eight copies of each.
All applications must be mailed and postmarked by January 15, 2009:
research proposal (not to exceed four, double-spaced pages)
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a curriculum vita
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two letters of recommendation
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two sample syllabi
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a one-page teaching statement
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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 2008-2009
Tekla Ali Johnson earned a Ph.D. in history at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 2005. Dr. Johnson served as Assistant Professor of History at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University from 2004-2006. She is presently an Assistant Professor of History at Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte, North Carolina, where she serves as the Coordinator of the African & African American Studies Program, Coordinator of the History Program; and is the co-founder of a Program in Public History. Dr. Johnson has published articles on race in the Journal of Contemporary American Studies, and the Black Scholar, and has authored a chapter on Frederick Douglass in Commemorating the Sesquicentennial of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, John R. Wunder, Ed., the University of Nebraska Press, 2008; and co-authored a chapter in Africana Cultures and Policy Studies: How African American History, Culture, and Studies Can Transform Africana Public Policy, in the Contemporary Black History Series, at Palgrave Macmillan, Ed. Manning Marable and Peniel Joseph, 2008-2009. She co-edited a textbook, Africana Legacy: Diasporic Studies in the Americas, (Tapestry Press, 2006) with Dr. Cecily B. McDaniel. Dr. Johnson was recently named an Exemplary Diversity Scholar for 2008-2009, by the University of Michigan’s National Center for Institutional Diversity. While in residence at the Johnson Institute, she will complete her book Defender of the Downtrodden: a Political Biography of Ernest Chambers, currently under review with Texas Tech University Press. Professor Johnson is in residence at the Johnson Institute under the auspices of the UNCF/Mellon Faculty Residency Program.
Robbie Lieberman received her B.A. from the University of California at Berkeley and her M.A. and Ph.D. in American Culture from the University of Michigan. She is currently Professor of History in the Department of History at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, Illinois. The working title of her current project is “`Peace and Civil Rights Don’t Mix, They Say’: Division, Repression, and Resistance, 1945-1963.” Her research will examine the relationship between the peace movement and the African American freedom movement from the end of World War II to the early 1960s, before Vietnam became a major public issue. The project explores some of the ways in which pressure on individuals and organizations to distance themselves from ideas and organizations associated with the Left contributed to dividing civil rights from peace, but it will also highlight examples of activists who resisted these constraints.
Dr. Trimiko Melancon is an Assistant Professor of English, Women’s Studies and Africana Studies at Auburn University. She received 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 at Amherst, Massachusetts. Professor Melancon’s teaching and scholarly interests lie primarily in African American and American literature and culture; black women’s literature and feminist theory; critical race, gender, and sexuality studies; and African American and Black German Studies. During her residency at the Johnson Institute, she will complete 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. Foregrounding selected texts, this study analyzes these writers’ characterizations of black women who not only diverge from stereotypical images imposed by ideologies of “whiteness,” but also rebel unapologetically against constructions of female identity imposed by nationalist discourse generally and black nationalism particularly. Drawing upon black feminist, critical race, and performance theories, as well as gender and sexuality discourse, Unbought and Unbossed examines these characters’ transgressive behavior, particularly with regard to their sexuality, as, in part, a means to create a modern black identity.
Joshua M. Price is Associate Professor in the Program in Philosophy, Interpretation, and Culture at the State University of New York at Binghamton, where he is also affiliated with the Program in Latin American and Caribbean Areas Studies. He received his doctorate in socio-cultural anthropology from the University of Chicago in 1998. From 2004 – 2007, he directed the NAACP’s Broome County Jail Health Care Project. This university-community collaboration, which he co-founded, monitors the health care of incarcerated people at the county jail, primarily through training students and community members to conduct interviews with currently and formerly incarcerated people. In 2006, he co-founded the Southern Tier Social Justice Project, composed of formerly incarcerated people and their allies, to advocate for formerly incarcerated people in the face of discrimination in housing, employment, health care, at the hands of parole officers, the police, and in other areas. For his efforts he has been honored as Citizen of the Year by the Broome/Tioga County NAACP. He has also received a citation by the New York State Assembly for ‘Outstanding Commitment to the Civil Rights of New Yorkers.’ He writes on institutionalized gendered and racial violence. While at the Johnson Institute, he will study the history and contemporary viability of a civil rights struggle to combat the social exclusion and discriminatory treatment of currently and formerly incarcerated people. He is at work on a manuscript tentatively entitled Incarceration and Social Death.
Institute 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. 
