Faculty Fellow Applications
Become a Faculty Fellow at the UT Humanities Center
The UT Humanities Center offers Faculty Fellowships to qualified full-time, tenure-stream faculty in its nine affiliated humanities departments. A UTHC Faculty Fellowship is a full-year research release from teaching and service while in residency at the UT Humanities Center. All successful applicants are required to participate in the life of the Center by working daily in the personal office provided at the UTHC, participating in and presenting their work in once-weekly Chandler Seminars, and (if desirable) participating in ongoing UTHC faculty seminars related to their work.
Residency for Faculty Fellows includes a personal office, access to our library liaison, opportunities publicly to present research and to work with distinguished visiting scholars, and use of all Center facilities. Fellows are eligible for travel funding through the UTHC Riggsby Travel Fund.
How it works
The Faculty Fellowship helps optimize research toward a significant investigative project by extending a UT faculty member’s already slated one-semester leave into a full year of concentrated research. That is, one semester of the Faculty Fellowship year is funded by the Humanities Center, while a second semester is obtained by the faculty member by using or combining
- a faculty development leave
- banked courses
- a pre-tenure semester leave
- a paid leave of absence
- a zero teaching semester, or
- a leave funded by an externally awarded fellowship.
To qualify for a Faculty Fellowship, faculty
- must have a defined research project
- must be eligible for leave through one of the avenues cited above, and
- must have applied for an external, national fellowship for the same project in the immediately past funding cycle or provide concrete evidence of intent to apply in the upcoming cycle before the start of the UTHC fellowship. (Examples of such fellowships include, but are not limited to, the NEH, ACLS, and Guggenheim.) External grant applications with deadlines after the Humanities Center deadline of December 1 will be considered provisional: no Humanities Center fellowship award will be confirmed until evidence of an external fellowship application is received. An applicant with questions should consult with the Humanities Center director.
How to apply
Applications for Faculty Fellowships are due on December 1 of the current calendar year. Faculty should follow the directions for application on this application form and submit their full application by deadline in December.
Any faculty applicants with questions should consult with the Humanities Center director by phone or email at any time.
“The humanities are the main course of life, the essential core of meaning in the world, where our values and our best selves are defined.”
—Amy J. Elias, UT Humanities Center Director
UT ranks tenth in the country among all universities, public and private, in the number of NEH fellowships received between 2004 and 2022.
Graduate students chosen to spend a year in the UTHC working on their dissertations graduate, on average, 1.5 years sooner, publish their first book sooner, and receive better job offers than other students in the humanities.
Faculty who spend a year at the University of Tennessee win NEH and other awards and publish award-winning books and research projects more quickly.