Graduate Fellowship in Critical Digital Humanities

(deadline 28 June, 2021)

The Graduate Fellowship in Critical Digital Humanities supports a small interdisciplinary cohort of University of Toronto Ph.D. candidates over the 2021-2022 academic year. Students will need to articulate their own project, which might involve engaging with digital humanities methods as the basis for a dissertation chapter or article; building a digital public humanities project or exhibit; or other DH research. For most applications, this project is likely to be part of the dissertation project.

Cohort Expectations
Fellows will form a community of practice and meet monthly between September and April. Over the course of the fellowship, each fellow will be expected to consult with relevant digital scholarship librarians whose expertise is aligned with the fellow’s research methods. Each fellow must commit to participating in two DH methods training workshops during the year and will present on their research at a late Spring 2022 event. Funded fellows must join the CDHI graduate student network and participate in CHDI activities including attending research symposia, roundtables, and visiting scholar talks.

Compensation
Fellows will receive a stipend of $10,000 for participating in the program and will be expected to dedicate approximately 300 hours for the fellowship between September and April.

Eligibility
University of Toronto graduate students who will have passed their comprehensive exams by 1 September 2021.

How to Apply
Please send the following to dhn.admin@utoronto.ca in one PDF file by the deadline:

• a cover sheet
• application cover sheet with a 250-word summary of the proposed project, written for a non-specialist audience, as well as the names and emails of two recommenders (see below). Applicants are also asked to fill out the CDHI membership form here.
• research proposal outlining your critical digital humanities project (maximum 2 pages + up to one additional page for references and any other supporting documentation, if necessary.) The 2-page proposal should include a statement of the research, with research questions; situate the research in relevant critical DH literature; describe the project’s methodology; and discuss the project’s objectives and deliverables over the fellowship period, with a timeline. If you plan to work with specific digital scholarship librarians or other collaborators, please indicate.
• CV

Deadline
Please submit your application, in one PDF file with the cover sheet, by the application deadline of June 28, 2021, 11:59 pm. Send your application to dhn.admin@utoronto.ca.

Evaluation
Applications will be evaluated on the following criteria:
–Ability to clearly articulate the research questions, project goals, and methodology.
–Clear demonstration of the research significance.
–Project’s relationship to research that emphasizes questions of power, social justice, and critical theory in making and analyzing digital technologies.

Adjudication
An interdisciplinary awards subcommittee, drawn from the CDHI Steering Committee, will be responsible for adjudicating applications. The CDHI Steering Committee is composed of community partners, faculty researchers, and digital scholarship librarians from each of the three campuses, the Faculty of Arts and Science, OISE, the Faculty of Information, and St. Michael’s University.

Reporting
Fellows will be expected to report on their fellowship by 1 April 2022. Recipients should anticipate submitting a brief report describing what was accomplished or what outcomes were achieved over the course of the fellowship.

Suggestions for Preparing Your Application
1) Situate your work in relationship to critical digital humanities. The Critical Digital Humanities Initiative (CDHI), a University of Toronto strategic initiative, supports trans-disciplinary collaborations that emphasize questions of power, social justice, and critical theory in digital humanities research. Our vision is to forge a new paradigm of critical humanities scholarship, one that bridges the humanities’ emphasis on power and culture in historical perspective with the tools and analysis of digital technology. The CDHI is new mix of research workshop and design atelier, equipping humanities researchers with the technical and design expertise to use digital tools to ask new questions, share new knowledge, and analyze power and inequality in historical perspective.

2) Consider your project’s data. By data, we mean the primary sources of humanistic inquiry, such as images (photographs, artworks); archival material (personal papers, company records, ephemera); sound recordings; moving images; text (emails, social media, books, plays); tabular data (statistics, charts, census records); maps, and other primary sources. Does this data already exist? Will you be producing it as part of your project?

3) Consider your project’s research approach. To get a sense of the wide range of methodologies in Digital Humanities, skim the excellent Please skim the excellent “Topics in DH” page of the online Digital Humanities Literacy Guidebook (Weingard, Grunewald, & Lincoln, 2020). This resource provides a good sense of the wide variety of tools and methods that can be included under the very broad umbrella of “digital humanities.”

How to Reach Us
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