Fellowship Opportunity

CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF LAW & CULTURE FELLOWSHIP

The Center for the Study of Law and Culture at Columbia University invites applications for residential fellowships for the 2007-2008 academic year to undertake research, writing and discussion in ways that span traditional academic disciplines. The CSLC welcomes scholars from any field who are interested in spending the academic year in residence at Columbia Law School working on scholarly projects relating to the CSLC's 2007-2008 theme: Executive Power.

We aim to appoint fellows whose scholarship addresses the critical and legal implications of expanding executive power not merely from the perspective of the state—such as the Bush administration's celebrated attempt to expand executive privilege vis-à-vis the other branches of US government—but from the perspective of power more generally. Since the post-structural assault on theories of power that posited it as emanating from a concentrated source, critical theory has conceptualized power as dispersed, capillary, and simultaneously productive and repressive. What might be the ramifications on legal and critical thought and practice at the intersection of new attempts to concentrate institutionally various forms and careers of power? We invite in particular scholarship whose focus is outside the US and lies at the critical conjuncture of law and culture. Fellows will be required to present an original paper from their research and to participate in a year long colloquium on the same topic.

The Law & Culture Fellowship is available to senior graduate students and post-doctoral candidates, including untenured faculty.

Founded in the fall of 2000, the Center for the Study of Law and Culture is an initiative at Columbia Law School designed to facilitate interdisciplinary study, research and scholarship on the intersections of law and culture. Our goal is to make the CSLC an institutional site for coordinating and coalescing the important, yet dispersed, interrogations of the relationship between law and culture that are already being undertaken across disciplines at Columbia University. By promoting and providing a home for cross-disciplinary engagement and collaboration, the CSLC will enrich each of our individual projects in law and culture studies.

Fellows will receive a stipend of $30,000, an office, computer, eligibility for university housing, and full access to university libraries, computer systems and recreational facilities. Fellows will be expected to participate in CSLC activities including presentation of a paper at the Center's Colloquium Series, and assistance in organizing Center events.

Applicants should submit:
1- a curriculum vitae
2- a writing sample (in the English language, about 25 pages in length)
3- a research statement (of approximately 1,000 words) that:
- describes the proposed work during the fellowship period
- explains the project's significance to the topic of Executive Power
- sets forth its interdisciplinary nature
4- TWO letters of recommendation (if sent with application, letter should be sealed in letterhead envelope and signed over the flap by referee). If more than two are sent, it is not guaranteed that all letters will be read.

Applications must be received at our office no later than February 15, 2007. E-mail applications will be accepted. Letters of recommendation may be sent under separate cover. Incomplete applications will be immediately disqualified.

Direct questions and application materials to:
Center for the Study of Law and Culture
Columbia University
435 W. 116th Street
New York, N.Y. 10027
USA
culture@law.columbia.edu

Women, people of color, non-US and independent scholars are particularly invited to apply.