Henry R. Luce Post-doctoral Fellowship at NYU Center for Religion and Media

The Center for Religion and Media at New York University (CRM) is pleased to announce the third in a series of one-year competitive postdoctoral fellowships funded by the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs for a project on Religious Stakes in Digital Times: Scholars and Journalists in Conversation.

We invite applications from scholars in the humanities and/or social sciences interested in writing about religion for the general public to join the staff of the center’s online magazine The Revealer: a review of religion and media for a year. The selected fellow will receive a stipend of $50,000 per year, access to the university libraries, as well as New York University health benefits. The successful candidate must have the doctorate in hand no later than May 31, 2018. The position begins on Sept 1, 2018 and ends on August 31, 2019.  

Religious Stakes in Digital Times: Scholars and Journalists in Conversation will foster new research, writing, and exchange on the role of religion in the world today. Carrying forward an evolving sense of the term “international,” we mean something that comprises both us and them, inextricably linked by, and overflowing beyond, borders that are increasingly blurred through digital instantaneous communication. Religious experience, like so many other forms of experience in a digitally linked world, travels fast, and travels globally.  This insight has, in turn, prompted us to enlarge our original “international frame” to include explicitly American religious life:  It’s time to think of everyone, ourselves especially, as international, as interlinked in the digital world. Tracking this linkage through religion is crucial. We are convinced that one cannot overlook the importance of experience on the ground or the knowledge acquired through deep study—the human, corporeal elements brought by journalists and scholars to broadening our understanding of religion in an internationalizing, globalizing world.

The Revealer publishes writers who are able to take a step back and write thoughtfully and critically about what we talk about when we talk about religion. It publishes writing that reflects upon religion as a key point of intersection between beliefs, practices, politics, representation, economics, identity, where the important forces that shape individuals, societies, and their relationship to each other play out. For writers, this can mean pointing a wider lens at the way others in the media cover an issue, or reviewing a book, or doing on- the-ground reporting on a situation. We publish work in many forms, be it blog posts, long form reporting, arts and culture reviews, first person narratives, or photography.

For this post-doctoral fellowship we seek scholars with projects in hand who wish to engage with other academics, journalists, and activists as part of their work. The successful candidate is doing innovative work in their field and has demonstrated interest in writing for a public (i.e., non-academic) readership in a style that is critically rigorous. The position would serve as a good stepping stone for scholars beginning academic careers as well as academically trained writers pivoting into other lines of work. We are seeking public intellectuals in all senses of the term.

Post-doctoral fellows would have two main assignments during their tenure at the CRM: to write and publish stories for The Revealer under the direction of the editor, and to plan and facilitate one workshop in the spring of their tenure with us. These funded workshops will provide occasion for substantive exchange between thinkers organized by post-docs, around their area of expertise, in consultation with CRM’s staff.

Application instructions

Candidates should submit their applications via email to CRM.post.doc@gmail.com by February 15, 2018.

Applications must include the following:

• Cover Letter of self-introduction.
• Curriculum Vitae
• Research Statement (2 pages) – Detailing the significance of the candidate’s area(s) of interest and plans for developing writing on it for publication in The Revealer.
• Workshop Proposal (2 pages) – Detailing plans for a workshop to take place in Spring 2018, inviting 4-6 interlocutors.
• Writing Samples (links to or PDFs of one academic and one non-academic piece of writing) No more than 30 double-spaced pages total.
• Three letters of recommendation (mailed separately to the same email address)