The 2024-25 Warren Center Faculty Fellowship theme is Alternative Ecologies led by Tiya Miles (History Department) and Walter Johnson (History Department).
The Warren Center, Harvard’s research center for United States history, invites applications for a seminar on Alternative Ecologies. This seminar will convene scholars, public-facing intellectuals, writers, and practitioners whose work falls under the broad umbrella of ecological study and care rooted in Black, and/or Indigenous, and/or feminist, and/or community-minded thought, culture, and history. This flexible thematic has been chosen to inspire new questions, highlight key issues, structure constructive dialogue, spark fresh ideas, and support works in progress in the academic arenas loosely deemed “black ecologies” and “racial ecologies.”
Alternative Ecologies grows out of the ecological turn in African American and Afro-diasporic studies, as well as ethnic studies, critical geography, Black and Indigenous feminist studies, and American studies, while recognizing that the field of Indigenous and Native American studies has always centered relationship with land, water, and multiple beings. The intellectual and political roots of the seminar stem from the notion of “Black Ecology,” a phrase introduced by the sociologist and founding editor of The Black Scholar, Nathan Hare, in 1970. In recent years, scholars in Black studies have revived the term and applied it to an exploration of Black experience, Black environmental history, and Black thought that proposes a long and radical relationship to “nature” in the context of environmental racism and struggles for environmental (inclusive of climate) justice. The currency and urgency of “Black ecologies” is evidenced by a burst of scholarship across institutions and platforms, and here at Harvard, by the keynote address given by the Columbia humanities scholar Farah Jasmine Griffin at the African American and African Studies Department’s 40th Anniversary Conference in February 2020. In her lecture, Professor Griffin highlighted “Black ecologies” as a future direction in Black studies writ large. A related and equally useful emergent term, “racial ecologies,” entwines our inquiries with ethnic studies and the histories of marginalized, racialized, and colonized populations studied in relation to place and environment. Our seminar will open outward from a “Black ecologies” starting point to broader engagement with the histories of various peoples and the landscapes they have inhabited and shaped.
Topics taken up in Black ecologies / African American environmental history have often included: plantation and maroon landscapes; gardening, provisioning, and food security; the commons; rural life and subsistence practices, urban life and green spaces; animals in history and literature (including the role of Indigenous and Black people as early theorists of animal rights); womanist/ feminist eco-theory and eco-criticism; and material experimental engagements in maintaining collective land bases and operating working, life-sustaining farms. We welcome proposals in these areas and many others, particularly projects focused on Indigenous peoples and lands, Black-Indigenous collaborative land-based projects and visions, and the material and natural histories of empire, migration, ethnicity, and diaspora in the Americas.
Fellows will present their work in a seminar led by Tiya Miles (History) and Walter Johnson (History). Applicants may not be degree candidates and should have a Ph.D. or equivalent. Fellows have library privileges and an office which they must use for at least the 9-month academic year. The Center encourages applications consistent with the seminar theme and from qualified applicants who can contribute, through their research and service, to the diversity and excellence of the community. Stipends: individually determined according to fellow needs and Center resources, up to a maximum of $66,000. Note that recent average stipends have been in the range of $50,000.
Application deadline: January 8, 2024
Letters of recommendation deadline: January 11, 2024
Letters of recommendation deadline: January 11, 2024
Application link: https://academicpositions.harvard.edu/postings/12745