Stipendiary Junior Research Fellowships 2019 – 2023
Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences
Junior Research Fellowships in Immateriality and in Representation:
King’s College Cambridge invites applications for a four-year Junior Research Fellowship from those who are completing or have recently completed a doctorate and who intend to pursue a research project on some aspect of the study of immateriality.
Materialism has long been an important theme in both historical studies (Marx etc.) and in philosophy. In the last few years the theme of materiality, the way the physical properties of an object have cultural consequences, has inspired a vast body of research, giving rise to talk of a ‘material turn’ in literary and historical studies. But even properly to understand the role of material, we badly need to explore materiality’s converse, immateriality. What is the immaterial, if indeed it ‘is’ anything at all? This call for applications is open to investigations of immateriality in its own right, for example as a concept in the history of philosophy; it is also open to projects concerned with the relation between the material (artefactual, biological, geological, etc.) and the immaterial. The latter might include, for example, research on intimations of immateriality, such as hauntings or symbolism perceived in material objects; analysis of the intellectual means by which the material is ordered, such as ‘form’, ‘scheduling’, ‘discipline’ or ‘evolution’; study of the digital imagination as it relates to technological and human constraints; the building of ideology into the design of objects or infrastructure, such as ‘anti-homeless architecture’; or research on immaterial aspects of the human body in the context of biological reductionism.
This post-doctoral Fellowship is intended to encourage such … read more