Fung Global Fellows Program Call for Applications
The 2020-21 program topic is “Thinking Globally.” How people have thought about the planet has informed the institutions, norms, and policies that have pulled it together and torn it apart. For centuries, ideas of free trade, human rights or global governance have framed cooperation and competition, order and disorder. Such ideas have also spawned border-crossing movements, from campaigns to end slavery to commitments to reduce carbon emissions. In turn, global thinking and action have often reinforced commitments to national ideas and efforts to curb global exchange. The goal of this research theme is to explore how ideas framed the understanding of interests and the making of institutions that have yielded commonness and conflict across and within borders. We also want to understand how these ideas and practices came into being through scientific networks, foundations, and think tanks. The Program will also examine rival world ideas that have challenged prevailing orthodoxies. Nowadays, with cooperative norms under challenge, global institutions under stress, and a century of guiding ideas about global convergence in doubt, we want to take a broad look at where these ideas came from, their effects, and the prospects for intellectual renewal or rethinking. The goal of the 2020-21 Fung Global Fellows cohort will be to explore the ways people learned to rely on or to reject strangers far away, as well as to imagine how global relationships came to be and could be different. We welcome applicants from all disciplinary and inter-disciplinary fields from the sciences to the humanities whose work addresses this set of themes in any historical period or world region.
Each year the program selects scholars from around the world to be in residence at Princeton for an academic year and to engage in research and discussion around a common theme. The number of candidates hired will depend on the qualifications of the overall applicant pools. Candidates will be considered in three categories: