Conference on Legal History of the European Union, June 21-22, 2018
The annual conference of the research field “Legal History of the European Union” will take place at the Frankfurt Max Planck Institute for European Legal History on June 21-22, 2018. The particular focus of this year’s meeting will be “Key Biographies in the Legal History of European Union, 1950-1993.”
Johnson Program for First Book Authors
Sponsored by the American Society for Legal History
Deadline for Applications: June 30, 2018
The American Society for Legal History (ASLH) announces a new program designed to provide advice and support to scholars working toward the publication of first books in legal history, broadly defined. In conversation with peers and with the advice of senior scholars, participants will develop and revise book proposals and sample chapters, and they will meet with guest editors to learn about approaching and working with publishers.
Applications for Johnson Fellows are invited from early career, pre-tenure scholars, publishing in English, who have completed PhDs or JDs and are working on first books in legal history. Scholars with expertise in all chronological periods and geographical fields are encouraged to apply, as are students who may not (yet) identify as legal historians.
The Johnson Program will begin in November, 2018 at the ASLH Annual Meeting in Houston and will include two in-person workshops and one remote consultation on work-in-progress:
November 8, 2018: One-day workshop at the ASLH Annual Meeting (Houston, TX), introduction to book publishing and prospectus writing;
Spring 2019 (date TBD): Remote meeting, peer and senior scholar feedback on draft prospectus; and
Summer 2019 (July 26-27): Two-day workshop on draft chapters, University of Pennsylvania Law School.
The 2018-19 Johnson Program will be led by Professor Reuel Schiller, with the participation of other senior legal historians. Participants must commit to participation in all three meetings.
The program will include up to 5 Fellows and will provide substantial funding for travel and accommodation.
The application deadline is June 30, 2018. Applicants should submit (as a single document Times New Roman, 12 point font):
cover letter (single spaced, not exceeding two pages) describing the applicant’s professional trajectory to date and reasons for interest in the Johnson Program;
curriculum vitae (including contact information);
project abstract (single spaced; up to 100 words)
project description (single spaced; not exceeding 750 words) organized with the following sections and headings: Introduction, Significance, Design and Methodology, Chapter Outline, Plans for Revision and Progress to Date.
two letters of recommendation from faculty members, at least one of whom should have been a major advisor of the project (sent separately from the other materials).
All materials should be submitted to Barbara Welke (welke004@umn.edu), Chair, University of Minnesota by June 30, 2018.
The 2018 Johnson Program for First Book Authors Committee
Barbara Young Welke, Chair, University of Minnesota, welke004@umn.edu
Lauren Benton, Vanderbilt University, lauren.benton@vanderbilt.edu
Sam Erman, USC Gould School of Law, serman@law.usc.edu
Kurt Graham, NARA, kurt.graham@nara.gov
Reuel Schiller, UC Hastings College of Law, schiller@uchastings.edu
Rayman Solomon, University of Rutgers-Camden School of Law, raysol@camlaw.rutgers.edu
Matthew Sommer, Stanford University, msommer@stanford.edu
Applicants will be notified by July 30, 2018. Please direct any questions to Barbara Welke.
Revisions to Society By-Laws
At a meeting held on Sunday March 25, 2018, the Board of Directors voted to make changes in the Society by-laws. The main changes adopted alter the length of committee service for Hurst Institute and Finance committee members (Article II, sections 7a and 9) and list the monograph series Studies in Legal History as an official mode of Society publication (Article V, section 2). A copy of the changes adopted are posted here to give notice formally to the membership about this vote. By-laws, proposed amendments for 2018, show All Markup
Post-doctoral fellowship at Northwestern University
Northwestern University’s Center for Legal Studies invites applications from outstanding candidates for a full-time, two-year, non-renewable teaching and research post-doctoral fellowship beginning fall 2018. The purpose of the fellowship is to recognize and support original interdisciplinary research and teaching in the study of law and inequality in race, crime, policing, mass incarceration, civil rights, and related subject areas.
Eligible candidates will hold a PhD in sociology, political science, history, psychology, economics or related disciplinary and interdisciplinary fields by the start of the appointment (August 15, 2018) and have a record of excellence in teaching and research in law and racial inequality.
The fellowship will be held in residence in Northwestern University’s Center for Legal Studies for two academic years (2018-19 & 2019-20). Fellows will teach two (2) undergraduate courses per year of the fellowship (4 total) and participate in the intellectual life of the Center including attending speaker events, workshops and reading groups in interdisciplinary legal studies.
Application info here: http://www.legalstudies.northwestern.edu/people/LIPostDoc2018.html
Call For Papers: Legal and Institutional Translation Policies
Leuven University (Belgium) is organizing a conference on the use of translation in public legal and administrative institutions, in the past and present. They would like to attract researchers from a variety of fields, including legal history, and are encouraging legal historians to consider applying to participate. The deadline for abstracts is February 1 2018. Registration to attend is currently open. More details may be found here: https://kuleuvencongres.be/litp2018
From the conference website: “Firstly, [the conference organizers wish] to document the state of affairs of the expanding and interdisciplinary field of legal and institutional translation, by approaching the latter through the lens of ‘translation policy’. This umbrella concept, as derived from Spolsky’s view on language policy (Gonzalez Nuñez 2016), embraces many features of translational communication: rules, agency, practices and values. In addition, it enables framing of translation across the separate disciplines’ realm, and so becomes a binding factor between the study of forms and techniques, multilingual and transnational translation forms, issues of governance and linguistic justice. Taking stock of translation policy as applied to legal and institutional translation needs accounting for historical (Wolf 2015; Schreiber & D’hulst 2017) as well as contemporary ones, theoretical as well as applied approaches (Gonzalez Nuñez & Meylaerts 2017). Historical insight gained by case studies should offer a basis for comparison, and advance the understanding of the embedding contexts and societal impact of translation policies past and present (Lannoy & Van Gucht 2006). It further needs the investigation of policies construed not only in Europe and the Americas but also in the much less studied areas of Asia and Africa, and the generally overlooked eras before the 20th century (Beukes 2007; Baxter 2013).
Secondly, this conference aims at the development of interdisciplinary policies engaging translation studies, legal and institutional studies, and political philosophy. Present-day challenges such as the exponential spread of multilingualism going hand in hand with plural or hybrid forms of citizenship, or the political and societal integration of allophone minorities and immigrants in particular indeed raise new questions. How should one ensure better linguistic integration of minorities in national public spaces and beyond, safeguard equal access to institutions as well as to public and private goods and services, create an inclusive society with due respect for diversity?”
Call for Participants: 2018 Student Research Colloquium
The American Society for Legal History will host a Student Research Colloquium (SRC) on Wednesday, Nov. 7, and Thursday, Nov. 8, 2018, immediately preceding the ASLH’s annual meeting in Houston, Texas. The SRC annually enables eight Ph.D. students and law students to discuss their in-progress dissertations and articles with distinguished ASLH-affiliated scholars. This year, the Department of History at Rice University will host the event.
The SRC’s target audience includes early-post-coursework graduate students and historically minded law students. The colloquium seeks to introduce such students to legal history, to each other, and to the legal-historical scholarly community. Students working in all chronological periods, including ancient and medieval history, and all geographical fields, including non-U.S. history, are encouraged to apply, as are students who have not yet received any formal training in legal history. Applicants who have not had an opportunity to present their work to the ASLH are particularly encouraged to apply. A student may be on the program for the annual meeting and participate in the SRC in the same year.
Each participating student will pre-circulate a twenty-page, double-spaced, footnoted paper to the entire group. The group will discuss these papers at the colloquium, under the guidance of faculty directors. The ASLH will provide at least partial and, in most cases, total reimbursement for travel, hotel, and conference-registration costs.
The application deadline is July 15, 2018. Applicants should submit:
• a cover letter describing, among other things, how far along you are and how many years remain in your course of study;
• a CV;
• a two-page, single-spaced “research statement” that begins with a title and proceeds to describe the in-progress research project that you propose to present at the colloquium; and
• a letter of recommendation from a faculty member, sent separately from, or together with, the other materials.
Organizers will notify all applicants of their decisions by August 15, 2018. Please direct questions and applications to John Wertheimer at: srcproposals@aslh.net.
Call for Submissions: Peter Gonville Stein book prize
The American Society for Legal History announces the Peter Gonville Stein Book Award, to be presented annually for the best book in legal history written in English. This award is designed to recognize and encourage the further growth of fine work in legal history that focuses on all non-US regions, as well as global and international history. To be eligible, a book must sit outside of the field of US legal history and be published during the previous calendar year. Announced at the annual meeting of the ASLH, this honor includes a citation on the contributions of the work to the broader field of legal history. A book may only be considered for the Stein Award, the Reid Award, or the Cromwell Book Prize. It may not be nominated for more than one of these three prizes.
The Stein Award is named in memory of Peter Gonville Stein, BA, LLB (Cantab); PhD (Aberdeen); QC; FBA; Honorary Fellow, ASLH, and eminent scholar of Roman law at the University of Cambridge, and made possible by a generous contribution from an anonymous donor.
For the 2018 prize, the Stein Award Committee will accept nominations of any book (not including textbooks, critical editions, and collections of essays) that bears a copyright date of 2017 as it appears on the printed version of the book. Translations into English may be nominated, provided they are published within two years of the publication date of the original version.
Nominations for the Stein Award (including self-nominations) should be submitted by March 15, 2018. Please send an e-mail to the Committee at steinaward@aslh.net and include: (1) a curriculum vitae of the author (including the author’s e-mail address); and (2) the name, mailing address, e-mail address, and phone number of the contact person at the press who will provide the committee with two copies of the book. This person will be contacted shortly after the deadline. (If a title is short-listed, six further copies will be requested from the publisher.)
Please contact the committee chair, Mitra Sharafi, with any questions: mitra.sharafi@wisc.edu
Institute for Constitutional History Seminar on William Howard Taft and Charles Evans Hughes
The Institute for Constitutional History is pleased to announce another seminar for advanced graduate students and junior faculty:
William Howard Taft and Charles Evans Hughes; the Travails and Contradictions of Progressivism within the Law: 1908-1941
Instructors:
Daniel R. Ernst is Professor of Law at the Georgetown University Law Center, where he has taught since 1988. He is the author of Lawyers against Labor: From Individual Rights to Corporate Liberalism (University of Illinois Press, 1995), which received the Littleton-Griswold Prize of the American Historical Association, and Tocqueville’s Nightmare: The Administrative State Emerges in America, 1900-1940 (Oxford University Press, 2014). He received the American Society for Legal History’s Surrency Prize in 2009 and was a Fulbright Scholar in New Zealand in 1996, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow in 2003-04, and a Law and Public Affairs Fellow at Princeton University in 2015-16.
Jonathan Lurie is a professor of history emeritus and formerly an Academic Integrity Officer at Rutgers University in Newark. He had been a member of the History Department there since 1969. His books include: The Chicago Board of Trade, Law and The Nation, Arming Military Justice, Pursuing Military Justice, The Slaughterhouse Cases [co-authored with Ronald Labbe], Military Justice in America, and The Chase Court. Lurie’s fields of interest comprise legal history, military justice, constitutional law and history, and eras of the Civil War and Reconstruction. The book on the Slaughterhouse cases received the Scribes award in 2003 as the best book written on law for that year. In 2005, he served as a Fulbright Lecturer at Uppsala University law School in Sweden. Lurie was the Visiting Professor of Law at West Point in 1994-1995. He has lectured on several occasions at the United States Supreme Court. His biography of William Howard Taft was published by Cambridge University Press in 2012. Lurie’s book on the Supreme Court and Military Justice was published late in 2013 by Sage/ CQ Publishers. He has just completed a manuscript for the University of South Carolina Press on the Taft Court (1921-1930).
Program Content:
Between them, Taft and Hughes served as Governor (H), Governor General (T); Circuit Court Judge (T), Secretary of War (T), President (T), Supreme Court Justice (H), Nominee for the Presidency (H), Secretary of State (H), Chief Justice (T), Chief Justice (H), and this list is not complete. It indicates, however, the impressive scope of their accomplishments. In 1916, Taft had called himself a “progressive Conservative,” while in 1935, the Taft’s biographer noted of his successor that as Chief Justice, Hughes had “ruled against capital, against labor, against the farmer and for the farmer, against Congress and for Congress, against the president and for him.” Hughes’ biographer described him as “an old fashioned progressive.” Alpheus Thomas Mason wrote that “Hughes’s mind was singularly devoid of ideological content or commitment.” How had progressivism been transformed during their careers? To what extent were both jurists “independent of rigid ideology?” This seminar seeks to explore these questions through books, articles, and discussion.
Logistics:
The dates the seminar will meet are: February 9 and 23, and March 9 and 23; Friday afternoons from 2-5 p.m. The seminar will be held at the New-York Historical Society, 170 Central Park West, New York City.
Application Process:
The seminar is designed for graduate students and junior faculty in history, political science, law, and related disciplines. All participants will be expected to complete the assigned readings and participate in seminar discussions. Although the Institute cannot offer academic credit directly for the seminar, students may be able to earn graduate credit through their home departments by completing an independent research project in conjunction with the seminar. Please consult with your advisor and/or director of graduate studies about these possibilities. Space is limited, so applicants should send a copy of their c.v. and a short statement on how this seminar will be useful to them in their research, teaching, or professional development. Materials will be accepted only by email at MMarcus@nyhistory.org until December 30, 2017. Successful applicants will be notified soon thereafter. For further information, please contact Maeva Marcus at (202) 994-6562 or send an email to MMarcus@nyhistory.org.
Additional Information:
There is no tuition or other charge for this seminar, though participants will be expected to acquire the assigned books on their own.
About ICH:
The Institute for Constitutional History (ICH) is the nation’s premier institute dedicated to ensuring that future generations of Americans understand the substance and historical development of the U.S. Constitution. Located at the New York Historical Society and the George Washington University Law School, the Institute is co-sponsored by the American Historical Association, the
Organization of American Historians, and the American Political Science Association. The Association of American Law Schools is a cooperating entity. ICH prepares junior scholars and college instructors to convey to their readers and students the important role the Constitution has played in shaping American society. ICH also provides a national forum for the preparation and dissemination of humanistic, interdisciplinary scholarship on American constitutional history.
Support for this seminar of the Graduate Institute for Constitutional History is provided in honor of Eric J. Wallach. The Graduate Institute for Constitutional History is supported, in part, by the Saunders Endowment for Constitutional History and a “We the People” challenge grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Call For Papers: ESCLH Conference, June 28-20, 2018
Laws Across Codes and Laws Decoded
28 June – 30 June 2018 at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (Paris)
The Organising Committee of the 5th Biennal Conference and the Executive Council of the European Society for Comparative Legal History are pleased to call for papers for the upcoming conference to be held. The main theme picks up threads of thought from the earlier ESCLH conferences in Valencia (2010), Amsterdam (2012), Macerata (2014) and Gdansk (2016) to explore what codes and codification have meant and continue to mean for legal systems with codes, and for those without. Papers should be submitted, as set out below, by 15 November 2017.
The conference will focus on the issue of codes or alternatives to codes as instruments of transforming laws in Europe and in the world. While codes, and the process of codification, are at least familiar if not always completely understood, this conference challenges us to look deeper at what a code meant for the legal systems affected by it. The conference seeks to understand the whole process of codification, from political aspects to its conception, agreement and roll-out, through to technical matters of drafting and implementation and even to linguistic matters of expression and deeper meanings. Challenging the importance for legal rules to be inserted within or outside a code, the conference proposes to examine all sorts of codes, and not only the most known civil codes: general codes as special (such as penal, commercial, labour, family, military) codes, officious codes as official codes. The conference seeks also to study the effects the codified structure of the norms could have on their content and on the way law functions, notably through case law and law writing. All the historical situations in which law reform took place outside of codification and outside of codes can be questioned could be relevant in helping us to understand law reform through codes or its alternatives.
Papers should be novel, properly researched and referenced. They should address the conference theme, exploring doctrinal, theoretical, cultural or methodological aspects of comparative legal history. They must also be comparative, addressing more than one system of laws. The organisers particularly welcome addressing multiple legal systems or cultures. This includes where a similar legal system functions in different cultural circles.
Practical details:
1. To offer a paper, please send the title of their paper, a short abstract (of 200-400 word, absolutely no more and a short CV (no more than 1 page) by 15 November 2017 to the organizing committee, c/o jean-louis.halperin@ens.fr.
2. The presentations should be in English.
3. It is also possible to submit a complete proposal for one or more panels (3 papers normally).
4. The list of accepted papers will be announced by 8 December 2017.
Shortly, a conference website will be launched with fuller details of the conference. For the moment, some transport and accommodation information follows.
Paris offers many accommodation possibilities ranging from five-star hotels, through smaller hotels in the Quartier latin and private rooms to beds in youth and student hostels. For some postgraduates the Ecole Normale Supérieure
could offer cheaper accommodation in student dormitories.
Call For Papers: “Many 14th Amendments” Conference
The University of Miami will be hosting a wide-ranging symposium entitled “The Many Fourteenth Amendments” to mark the sesquicentennial. The symposium will be held on March 1-3, 2018 in Miami (Coral Gables more specifically). The announcement with more details may be found here. Paper proposals are currently being solicited and the deadline is September 15.
2017 ACLS Fellowship Recipients from the American Society for Legal History
We are very pleased to announce the 2017 cohort of ACLS fellowship recipients from among the members of the ASLH.
Chazkel, Amy – ACLS Fellowship Program Associate Professor, History, City University of New York, Queens College
Urban Chiaroscuro: Rio de Janeiro and the Politics of Nightfall
Gross, Ariela J. – ACLS Collaborative Research Fellowship Professor, Law and History, University of Southern California
Comparing Law, Slavery, Race and Freedom in the Americas: Cuba, Louisiana, and Virginia, 1500-1868
Nolan, Rachel – Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship Doctoral Candidate, History, New York University
“Children for Export”: A History of International Adoption from Guatemala
Schmitt, Casey – Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship Doctoral Candidate, History, College of William & Mary
Bound among Nations: Labor Coercion in the Early Seventeenth-Century Caribbean
Student Research Colloquium announced
The American Society for Legal History will host a Student Research Colloquium (SRC) on Wednesday, October 25, and Thursday, October 26, 2017, immediately preceding the ASLH’s annual meeting in Las Vegas, Nevada. The SRC enables a small number of Ph.D. students and law students to discuss their in-progress dissertations and law review articles with distinguished ASLH-affiliated scholars.
The SRC’s target audience includes early-post-coursework graduate students and historically minded law students. The colloquium seeks to introduce such students to legal history, to each other, to the ASLH, and to the legal-historical scholarly community generally. Students working in all chronological and geographical fields are encouraged to apply, as are students whose projects engage legal-historical themes but who have not yet received any formal training in legal history. Applicants who have not had an opportunity to present their work at ASLH annual meetings or who have not otherwise had an opportunity to discuss their work with legal historians are particularly encouraged to apply. A student may be on the program for the annual meeting and participate in the SRC in the same year.
Each participating student will pre-circulate a twenty-page, double-spaced, footnoted paper to the entire group. The group will discuss these papers at the colloquium, under the guidance of two faculty directors. The ASLH will provide at least partial and, in most cases, total reimbursement for travel, hotel, and conference-registration costs.
The application deadline is July 15, 2017. Applicants should submit:
* a cover letter;
* a CV;
* a two-page, single-spaced “research statement,” describing an in-progress project; and
* a letter of recommendation from a faculty member, sent separately from, or together with, the other materials.
Organizers will notify all applicants of their decisions by August 15, 2017. Please direct questions and applications to John Wertheimer at <email>.
Kathryn T. Preyer Scholars: Call for Papers, 2017
Named after the late Kathryn T. Preyer, a distinguished historian of the law of early America known for her generosity to young legal historians, the program of Kathryn T. Preyer Scholars is designed to help legal historians at the beginning of their careers. At the annual meeting of the Society two early career legal historians designated Kathryn T. Preyer Scholars will present what would normally be their first papers to the Society. The generosity of Professor Preyer’s friends and family has enabled the Society to offer a small honorarium to the Preyer Scholars and to reimburse, in some measure or entirely, their costs of attending the meeting. The competition for Preyer Scholars is organized by the Society’s Kathryn T. Preyer Memorial Committee.
Submissions are welcome on any topic in legal, institutional and/or constitutional history. Early career scholars, including those pursuing graduate or law degrees, those who have completed their terminal degree within the previous year, and those independent scholars at a comparable stage, are eligible to apply. Papers already submitted to the ASLH Program Committee–whether or not accepted for an existing panel–and papers never previously submitted are equally eligible. Once selected, Preyer Award winners must present their paper as part of the Preyer panel, and they will be removed from any other panel.
Submissions should be a single MS Word document consisting of a complete curriculum vitae, contact information, and a complete draft of the paper to be presented. Papers must not exceed 40 pages (12 point font, double-spaced) and must contain supporting documentation. In past competitions, the Committee has given preference to draft articles and essays, though the Committee will still consider shorter conference papers, as one of the criteria for selection will be the suitability of the paper for reduction to a twenty-minute oral presentation. The deadline for submission is June 15, 2017.
Kathryn T. Preyer Scholars will receive a $500 cash award and reimbursement of expenses up to $750 for travel, hotels, and meals. Each will present the paper that s/he submitted to the competition at the Society’s annual meeting in Las Vegas, NV in October 2017. The Society’s journal, Law and History Review, has published several past winners of the Preyer competition, though it is under no obligation to do so.
Please send submissions as Microsoft Word attachments by June 15, 2017 to the chair of the Preyer Committee, H. Timothy Lovelace <email>. He will forward them to the other committee members.
The 2017 Preyer Memorial Committee
H. Timothy Lovelace, (2014) Chair, Indiana University
Melissa Hayes (2014), Independent Scholar
Michael Hoeflich (2014), University of Kansas
Rabia Belt (2016), Stanford University
Jed Shugerman (2016), Fordham University
More information, including a list of past Preyer Scholars, can be found here: https://aslh.net/about-aslh/honors-awards-and-fellowships/preyer-scholars/
Shortlist for the Langum Prize in American Legal History and Biography Announced
The shortlisted books are:
Ballot Battles: The History of Disputed Elections in the United States, by Edward B. Foley (Oxford University Press).
Discrediting the Red Scare: The Cold War Trials of James Kutcher, “The Legless Veteran,” by Robert Justin Goldstein (University Press of Kansas).
The Great Yazoo Lands Sale: The Case of Fletcher v. Peck, by Charles F. Hobson (University Press of Kansas).
Vagrant Nation: Police Power, Constitutional Change, and the Making of the 1960s, by Risa Goluboff (Oxford University Press).
The final decision will be announced on the Langum Charitable Trust’s website, www.langumtrust.org, in about one month.
Fellowship Opportunity, Stanford Center for Law and History
This fellowship is intended for people who have completed (or will soon complete) their training in law and history and who seek to pursue an academic career at the intersection of the two fields.
The Stanford Center for Law and History fellowship is a residential fellowship that provides an opportunity to conduct research in the dynamic environment of Stanford University. We prefer two-year fellowships to help the fellow complete a significant body of independent scholarship, but we are willing to consider one-year terms. We expect that fellows will dedicate most of their time to pursuing their proposed research projects but will also devote some time to organizing and implementing other Center activities, including an ongoing workshop series and an annual conference. Fellows are encouraged to become part of a lively law-school-wide community of individuals with an interest in academia by attending weekly faculty lunch seminars and by participating in activities with the other fellows at Stanford Law School to learn more about one another’s scholarship and about academic life more generally. In addition, fellows are encouraged to attend and participate in the broad range of lectures and workshops available within the broader university, including inter alia, the History Department and the Stanford Humanities Center.
For the 2017-2018 fellowship, we will provide a workspace, a competitive salary, and a generous benefits package. Applicants who have completed (or are soon to complete) both a J.D. and a Ph.D in history are strongly preferred.
The Application Process:
All applicants should apply through the Stanford Careers website, Job Number 73767: https://stanfordcareers.stanford.edu/job-search?jobId=73767, and should include the following: (1) a CV; (2) a sample of academic writing; (3) a research proposal of no more than five double-space pages (briefly outlining past work but focused primarily on research to be undertaken during the fellowship); and (4) official transcripts of all academic work pursued in college, as well as in graduate programs. In addition, (5) applicants should provide two letters of recommendation, to be emailed directly by the recommenders themselves to Molly Pahkamaa at mpahkama@law.stanford.edu. All applications should be submitted no later than Tuesday, February 28, 2017.
The Stanford Center for Law and History, directed by Professor Amalia Kessler, brings together faculty and students from across Stanford University’s many schools and departments (and beyond) to participate in a broad range of conferences, workshops, and lectures devoted to examining the multifaceted interrelationships between law and history (without geographic, temporal, or other subject-area limitations).
NEH Public Scholars Program
The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) invites applications for the 2017 round of the Public Scholar Program, which is intended to support well-researched books in the humanities that have been conceived and written to reach a broad readership. Books supported through the Public Scholar Program might present a narrative history, tell the stories of important individuals, analyze significant texts, provide a synthesis of ideas, revive interest in a neglected subject, or examine the latest thinking on a topic. Most importantly, they should present significant humanities topics in a way that is accessible to general readers.
The Public Scholar Program is open to both independent scholars and individuals affiliated with scholarly institutions. It offers a stipend of $4,200 per month for a period of six to twelve months. The maximum stipend is $50,400 for a twelve-month period. Applicants must have U.S. citizenship or residency in the U.S. for the three years prior to the application deadline. In addition, they must have previously published a book with a university or commercial press or at least three articles and essays in publications reaching a large national or international audience.
Application guidelines (including a full statement of the eligibility requirements) and a list of F.A.Q.’s for the Public Scholar Program are available on the NEH’s website at http://www.neh.gov/grants/research/public-scholar-program. The application deadline for this cycle is February 1, 2017. Recipients may begin the term of the grant as early as September 1, 2017 or as late as September 1, 2018. In the last cycle of the competition, the Endowment received 318 applications and made 30 awards.
A list of previously funded projects and several samples of successful applications are available in the sidebar at the right of the webpage linked above. For additional information, please write to publicscholar@neh.gov.
Schwarzman Scholars Program – Visiting Faculty Positions
The Schwarzman Scholars Program at Tsinghua University in Beijing seeks to recruit Visiting Faculty from the world’s leading universities and
institutions for the 2017-18 academic year. These international scholars and practitioners will engage a highly motivated cohort of future
leaders through Schwarzman Scholars’ unique, interdisciplinary curriculum focused on contemporary global issues. Visiting Faculty also
have opportunities to pursue independent research and develop collaborations with Tsinghua colleagues. Eligible candidates include
early, mid-career and senior level academics who are available to spend from one to eleven months in Beijing. For more information, see the Schwarzman Scholars Visiting Faculty Flyer.
ASLH Announces New Book Prize: Peter Gonville Stein Book Award
The American Society for Legal History announces the Peter Gonville Stein Book Award, to be presented annually for the best book in legal history written in English. This award is designed to recognize and encourage the further growth of fine work in legal history that focuses on all non-US regions, as well as global and international history. To be eligible, a book must sit outside of the field of US legal history and be published during the previous two calendar years. Announced at the annual meeting of the ASLH, this honor includes a citation on the contributions of the work to the broader field of legal history. A book may only be considered for the Stein Award, the Reid Award, or the Cromwell Book Prize. It may not be nominated for more than one of these three prizes.
For the 2017 prize, the Stein Award Committee will accept nominations of any book that bears a copyright date of 2015 or 2016 as it appears on the printed version of the book.
Nominations for the Stein Award should be submitted by March 15, 2017. Please send an e-mail to steinaward@aslh.net and include: (1) a curriculum vitae of the author; and (2) the name, mailing address, e-mail address, and phone number of the contact person at the press who will provide the committee with two copies of the book. This person will be contacted shortly after the deadline. (If a title is short-listed, six further copies will be requested from the publisher.)
Please contact the committee chair, Mitra Sharafi, with any questions: mitra.sharafi@wisc.edu
ACLS Digital Extension Grants: Deadline January 25, 2017
The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) is pleased to invite applications for the 2016-17 ACLS Digital Extension Grant competition, which is made possible by the generous assistance of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. It is hoped that these grants will help advance humanistic scholarship by enhancing established digital research projects and extending their reach to new communities of users.
This program aims to extend the opportunity to participate in the digital transformation of humanistic inquiry to a greater number of humanities scholars. To this end, projects supported by ACLS Digital Extension Grants may:
Extend established digital projects and resources with content that adds diversity or interdisciplinary reach
Develop new systems of making established digital resources available to broader audiences and/or scholars from diverse institutions
Foster new team-based work or collaborations that allow scholars from institutions with limited digital infrastructure to exploit digital resources
Create new forms and sites for scholarly engagement with the digital humanities. Projects that document and recognize participant engagement are strongly encouraged
Support projects aimed at preserving and making sustainable established digital projects and content.
ACLS will award up to six Digital Extension Grants in this competition year. Each grant provides funding of up to $125,000 to support a range of project costs, including, where necessary, salary replacement for faculty or staff. As this program places special emphasis on extending access to digital research opportunities to scholars working at US colleges and universities of all categories, applicants also may request up to an additional $25,000 to fund concrete plans to collaborate with and build networks among scholars from US higher education institutions of diverse profiles. Thus each grant carries a maximum possible award of $150,000.
The deadline for applications is 9pm EST, January 25, 2017. Applications will be accepted only through ACLS’s Online Fellowship and Grant Application (OFA) system.
Additional information about the eligibility criteria and terms of ACLS Digital Extension Grants is available at www.acls.org/programs/digitalextension/. Questions may be directed to fellowships@acls.org. For more information about ACLS programs, visit www.acls.org.
ASLH Election Results Announced
At the Saturday luncheon of the 2016 annual meeting in Toronto, President Rebecca Scott announced the results of the elections for the Board of Directors and Nominating Committee. The following members stand elected to the Board, where they will serve three-year terms:
Alexandra Havrylyshyn (graduate student representative), University of California, Berkeley
Angela Fernandez, University of Toronto
Catharine MacMillan, King’s College London
Kunal Parker, University of Miami
Christopher Schmidt, Chicago-Kent College of Law/American Bar Foundation
The new members of the Nominating Committee, who will also serve three-year terms, are
Mitra Sharafi, University of Wisconsin
Karen Tani, University of California, Berkeley
J. Willard Hurst Summer Institute in Legal History
Call for Applications Application Deadline: December 1, 2016
The American Society for Legal History and the Institute for Legal Studies at the University of Wisconsin Law School are pleased to invite applications for the ninth biennial Hurst Summer Institute in Legal History. The purpose of the Hurst Institute is to advance the approach to legal scholarship fostered by J. Willard Hurst in his teaching, mentoring, and scholarship. The Hurst Institute assists scholars from law, history, and other disciplines in pursuing research on the legal history of any part of the world.
The 2017 Hurst Institute will be led by Mitra Sharafi, Associate Professor of Law and Legal Studies (with History affiliation) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The two-week program features presentations by guest scholars, discussions of core readings in legal history, and analysis of the work of the participants in the Institute. The ASLH Hurst Selection Committee will select twelve Fellows to participate in this event.
Eligibility
Scholars in law, history and other disciplines pursuing research on legal history of any part of the world are eligible to apply. Preference will be given to applications from scholars at an early stage of their career (beginning faculty members, doctoral students who have completed or almost completed their dissertations, and J.D. graduates with appropriate backgrounds).
Fellowship Requirements
Fellows are expected to be in residence for the entire two-week term of the Institute, to participate in all program activities of the Institute, and to give an informal works-in-progress presentation in the second week of the Institute.
Application Process
Details of the application process can be found on the Hurst Institute website. Applications will be accepted until December 1, 2016. Please send questions by email.
