This year’s Institute, directed by Tina Chen and Eric Hayot, focuses on the topic of “Migratory Aesthetics and Asian/American Studies.”
Institute participants spend a week reading and thinking about the annual theme, as well as significant time workshopping their work in progress. Penn State will cover travel, housing, and most meals for the week of the Institute. Applicants must have completed their PhDs between August 2010 and 2015, or be advanced graduate students who are completing their dissertations.
On the theme:
Allowing the genitive force of the phrase “Migratory Aesthetics” to go both ways, we intend to indicate a variety of potential variations on the theme:
- the ways in which aesthetics migrate; the difference between aesthetics that migrate and don’t; what happens to aesthetics in migration;
- the aesthetic dimensions of migration; the ways in which migration generates (or refuses to generate) particular forms of sensory experience; the process whereby geographical and cultural movement and change formalize themselves (or refuse to formalize themselves) in something that might stabilize enough to be thought of as “aesthetic” at all.
We welcome projects thinking with, through, or against any of these provocations, which intend to begin a conversation that will continue through the Institute and, ideally, beyond it. Particularly strong work will be considered for publication in Verge: Studies in Global Asias.
To apply, please send the following documents in a single PDF file to verge[at]psu.edu by April 3, 2015.
- A cover letter (up to 2pp) outlining your current career/research stage, and articulating a connection to the Institute theme.
- A sample of your current work (10-20 pp). This need not be the piece you plan to workshop over the summer. It should nonetheless give the review committee some sense of your current and future work.
- A current c.v.
- Advanced graduate students must also include a letter from the dissertation adviser on academic progress and status.