Announcements

Graduate Student Opportunity: Mellon Sawyer Doctoral Fellowships

The Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA) invites applications for two (2) Mellon Sawyer Doctoral Fellowships to participate in the Sawyer seminar series “The Data that Divide Us: Recalibrating Data Methods for New Knowledge Frameworks Across the Humanities” for the 2023-24 academic year.

Over the course of the year, this Mellon funded Sawyer Seminar will hold a series of 8 interdisciplinary workshops (and 1 day-long symposium) that will analyze how the latency of values involving gender, race, and the medical normal are encoded into existing data sets and the methodologies that we use to analyze them. The seminar will foster a sustained dialogue between local participants and invited speakers on the intersection of data science and the humanities as we explore three key fault lines in our relationship between our research and our data: data before and after the digital divide, the ongoing legacies of nineteenth-century conceptions of data, and the challenges posed by premodern conceptions of scale.

The primary responsibility of the Mellon Sawyer Doctoral Fellows will be to actively participate in the seminar series, as speakers and interlocutors. In addition, they will assist the seminar leaders (Giovanna Ceserani, Mark Algee-Hewitt, Laura Stokes, and Grant Parker) and CESTA staff in arranging the logistics of the events, communicating with invited guests, and advertising the workshops to the Stanford and Bay Area communities. They will receive one full-year graduate stipend, including benefits and TGR tuition. Graduate students currently working with CESTA or its constituent labs or projects, or current or former participants in the CESTA Digital Humanities Fellows program are particularly encouraged to apply, but applications from any humanities Stanford graduate student interested in the seminar topic are welcome. Applicants must hold Terminal Graduate Registration status by the time of appointment (September 2023), and preference will be given to applicants in need of funding with a prospective graduation date of June 2024.

To apply, please send CV and a brief description (500 words) of your dissertation project and previous Digital Humanities work by Monday, May 1st to cesta_stanford [at] stanford.edu (cesta_stanford[at]stanford[dot]edu)