FQRSC Postdoctoral Fellowships
To access the FQRSC website, click here.
Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowships
The Faculty of Arts has received a substantial grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and has established a postdoctoral fellowship program in the humanities and social sciences.
Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowships 2013-2014
To view the 2013-2014 Fellowship Requirements and Application process, click on the link: mellon_postdoctoral_fellowships_fall_2012_competition.pdf
Mellon Postdoctoral Fellows at McGill
2012-2014
Charles Sharpe completed a BA in Political Science from Furman University in South Carolina, an MA in International Relations from Yale, and an MA and PhD in History from the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Sharpe was the 1999 recipient of a Rotary International Ambassadorial Scholarship at the University of Bonn, Germany, and the 2000 recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship. From 2004-2005 Dr. Sharpe worked for the United Nations Development Program in New York, where he helped to develop mine action strategies for national development agencies. In his doctoral dissertation “The Origins of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration,” Dr. Sharpe examines how the United States conceived and executed its plan for post-WWII relief. He reveals covert American aspirations to use the emerging United Nations system to facilitate the creation of an American empire. During his tenure as a Mellon fellow, Dr. Sharpe will broaden the scope of his dissertation to examine more closely the interplay of American diplomacy with the Chinese, Soviet, British and Canadian governments in the creation of the United Nations. His research will be conducted under the supervision of Professor Lorenz Lüthi in the Department of History and Classical Studies.
Noémie Solomon holds a PhD in Performance Studies from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, and a Maîtrise and Diplôme d’études approfondies (DEA) in Dance studies from Université Paris VIII. In 2003 Dr. Solomon was a visiting scholar at Brown University’s Department of Theater, Dance and Speech. After completing her doctoral dissertation on contemporary choreography in Europe, she was awarded a Mellon fellowship to undertake her postdoctoral project on dance in Quebec after 1948. Specifically, she will be addressing issues of movement, performance and subjectivity: the ways in which choreographic experiments redefine the role and status of the moving body. Dr. Solomon’s research at McGill is carried out under the supervision of Professors Erin Hurley and Alanna Thain from the Department of English. Together with her supervisors, she will contribute to the “Representation, Performance, Culture” research axis of the Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies, as well as McGill’s CFI-funded Moving Image Research Laboratory. Dr. Solomon also works on curatorial initiatives for art venues and festivals in Europe and the United States.
2011-2013
Peter Rudiak-Gould comes to McGill from Oxford University, where he completed both his MPhil and DPhil in Anthropology. He also holds undergraduate degrees in Cognitive Science and Linguistics from the University of California, San Diego. Dr. Rudiak-Gould conducts research on climate change focusing on the role of scientific expertise in influencing climate change beliefs in indigenous communities. His work has guided climate change educational policy in the Australian Prime Minister’s Office, and he has received significant media attention for his extensive fieldwork and numerous publications on the Micronesian Marshall Islands. Dr. Rudiak-Gould has broadened the scope of his research to include the study of climate change issues in the indigenous Sami communities of Norway, where he has already conducted preliminary fieldwork on reindeer herders. His Mellon Fellowship at McGill is under the supervision of Professor Colin Scott in the Department of Anthropology. Dr. Rudiak-Gould also works closely with McGill’s Centre for Technology, Society and Development (STANDD), and with researchers at the McGill School of Environment.
Leslie Tomory obtained his MA and PhD in the History of Technology from the University of Toronto. He also holds a MEng from McGill in Aerospace Engineering. Dr. Tomory examines the development of early industrial networks – canal, gas, water, and sewage systems – in Industrial Revolution Britain. He investigates these systems from the points of view of construction, governance and stabilization, and examines how they borrowed legal, financial and business models from each other. He also studies questions of how British companies built and operated subsidiaries throughout Europe. His Mellon Fellowship is supervised by Professor Brian Lewis from the Department of History and Classical Studies. Dr. Tomory is actively involved in the History and Philosophy of Sciences seminar and lecture series at McGill. His monograph on the origins of the gaslight industry is being published by MIT Press in 2012 as part of its Transformations series.
Timothy Waligore holds an MA, MPhil and PhD in Political Science from Columbia University, and a BA in Government from Dartmouth College. He comes to McGill after completing postdoctoral fellowships at the Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt, Germany and Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. Dr. Waligore’s expertise is in the history of modern political thought and contemporary political theory. He examines the links between cosmopolitanism and imperialism using the writings of Kant, Fichte and Hegel, and draws on contemporary discussions of the relationship between justice and context. His work contributes to contemporary debates on how to resolve tensions between claims based on historical injustices, global distributive justice, and multicultural citizenship. Dr. Waligore’s research is supervised by Professor Jacob Levy and other theorists in the Department of Political Science and in the Department of Philosophy.
2010-2012
Philip Slavin has a broad background in the fields of history and economics, as well as undergraduate degrees in musicology and violin performance. He received his PhD in Medieval History from the University of Toronto and went on to do postdoctoral studies at Yale University's Economic Growth Center. Under the supervision of Professor George Grantham in the Department of Economics, Dr. Slavin is studying the impact of environmental crises on nutrition and health in late medieval England. Crop failures, floods and cattle plague caused widespread starvation and disease that ultimately claimed forty percent of England's population by 1351. Dr. Slavin has identified, digitized and tabulated over 6,000 archival sources from various repositories in the UK. The application of statistical models to these records will enable him to further our understanding of the long-reaching impacts of these events. Dr. Slavin is already widely published and is the recipient of many prizes and grants. He speaks three languages and has a reading knowledge of fifteen others.
Arne Hintz obtained his MA in International Political Economy from the University of Warwick, Coventry, UK and his PhD in Political Science from the University of Hamburg, Germany. Prior to his postdoctoral research fellowship at McGill, Dr. Hintz was Program Director of the Center for Media and Communication Studies at Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. Under the supervision of Professor Marc Raboy, Dr. Hintz is investigating issues related to global media governance. In particular, he is studying the policy environment of community and citizens media, the role of technological standard setting, and questions of power and participation in emerging governance regimes. Dr. Hintz is actively involved in the Media@McGill research hub, and is the project manager for the international research project "Mapping Global Media Policy." Dr. Hintz has a practical background in journalism and alternative media activism, he has been a community media advocate at the UN World Summit on the Information Society, the European Union and UNESCO, and he works as policy adviser with the Community Media Forum Europe and the World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters. He is a co-founder of the Civil Society Media Policy Consortium, and vice-chair of the Community Communication section of the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR).
Former Fellows
2009-2011
Carlotta Daro received her BA from the University of Rome, and her MA and PhD in the History of Art from the Sorbonne. While at McGill under the direction of Professor Jonathan Sterne, Dr. Daro is pursing research on the impact of telecommunication infrastructures in shaping urban form and experience in North America. Since 2001 Dr. Daro has been teaching courses on the history and theory of modern architecture at the Ecole Nationale Superiéure d'Architecture Paris Malaquais and in 2008 she was a Visiting Scholar at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal. Her work has already contributed significantly to the fields of art history, architecture, music and communication studies. She is working on a critical study of architectural acoustics, which was the synthesis of her doctoral research on the relationship between sound and architecture in the latter half of the twentieth century. Dr. Daro is currently involved in a project on Muzak as a commercial industry and its role as an agent for the conditioning of public and private space. She has worked extensively as an archivist, architectural journalist and curator of art and architectural exhibitions.
Jean-François Gauvin completed his MA and PhD at Harvard in the History of Science. He also holds an MA in the History of Geophysics and a BSc in Mathematical Physics from the Université de Montréal. His doctoral dissertation concentrated on how natural philosophy in seventeenth-century France was influenced by the material culture of science. Under the supervision of Professor Nicholas Dew, Dr. Gauvin is taking his doctoral research a step further and is investigating the involvement of the French artisanal community in the manufacture of scientific instruments. His multidisciplinary approach draws upon anthropology, art history, historical archaeology, the history of science, and engineering. Dr. Gauvin has worked as a curator of the scientific collections at the Stewart Museum in Montreal and at Harvard's Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments. He conducts his research in six foreign languages.
Mark Algee-Hewitt received his MA from the University of Western Ontario, and his PhD from New York University in the Department of English. His doctoral dissertation explored the history of the sublime in eighteenth-century literature through the study of word clusters in over 3000 texts. He also has extensive training in computer science and statistics. Under the supervision of Professors Tom Mole (English) and Andrew Piper (German), he is exploring the potential today's digital resources have to provide a new understanding of the socio-cultural, political and literary transformations that took place during the eighteenth century. Dr. Algee-Hewitt's use of McGill's computer-assisted textual analysis resources reflects the Faculty's emphasis on digital research in the humanities. He is also working closely with the Interacting with Print research group at McGill as he explores the role print played in these transformations. Dr. Algee-Hewitt has extensive experience teaching literature and critical theory at both New York and Rutgers Universities.
Banting Postdoctoral Fellowships
Application Deadline: 12 NOON, Monday, September 24, 2012
The Faculty of Arts will once again be conducting an internal competition to select its candidates for the Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship competition. The prospective McGill supervisors of Banting applicants should submit a letter of support as well as the applicant's CV and the applicant's one-page research statement outlining his/her proposed postdoctoral research program. Please e-mail these materials to our office at ADR [dot] arts [at] mcgill [dot] ca by noon on Monday, September 24, 2012. Please attach all documents to the e-mail as a single PDF file.
As fit with the institution is a key element in the Banting selection process, the prospective supervisor's support letter should clearly describe the complementarities between the applicant's research program and McGill's resources/faculty research. In keeping with the intention of the call for applications, supervisors should not nominate current McGill graduate students to hold a Banting at McGill. The Banting fellowship program is open to both national and international students. Applicants must have fulfilled all degree requirements for a PhD on a date within the eligibility window of November 2, 2009, through December 31, 2012.
Note that as these are extremely competitive fellowships (only 70 will be awarded in all fields across all of Canada), we request that each faculty member submit only one candidate for consideration by the selection committee. Based on the materials submitted, the Faculty of Arts Committee on Research will invite approximately 3-5 candidates to prepare full applications to forward to the national competition. Prospective supervisors and applicants will be notified of the selection committee’s decision by October 1, 2012.
Once applicants have been selected, the Dean's office will work with prospective supervisors and their units to craft the full application and to receive the Institutional Letter of Endorsement in time to meet the national Banting application deadline of November 1. Because we are holding a Faculty-level competition, all applications forwarded by Arts will receive institutional endorsement.
Please consult the Banting website http://banting.fellowships-bourses.gc.ca/home-accueil-eng.html and McGill’s GPS website http://www.mcgill.ca/gps/postdocs/fellowships/banting for further details on the fellowship and for the responsibilities of the applicant, supervisor, and other university offices.
Banting Postdoctoral Fellow
2011-2013
Jessica Coon received her PhD in Linguistics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and comes to McGill after a one-year postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University. Under the supervision of Professor Lisa Travis, Dr. Coon is pursuing research on the morphology and syntax of Mayan (spoken in Guatemala, southern Mexico, Belize) and Austronesian (spoken in Southeast Asia and the Pacific) languages. She is engaged in a detailed comparison of rare grammatical similarities found in the individual languages of these two unrelated language families. This curious phenomenon lends support to the hypothesis that all human languages share certain innate basic principles. Dr. Coon’s research fills a lacuna in the field by making a significant contribution to our knowledge of these to date under-studied languages. Her work also increases our understanding of the possible range of variation of human language, the consequences of which have implications both for theoretical linguistics and for our understanding of the underlying nature of human language itself. Dr. Coon is currently involved in two major research projects at McGill, and is working in collaboration with the interdisciplinary Centre for Research on Language, Mind and Brain (CRLMB).
SSHRC Agency Presentation [.pdf]
To access the SSHRC Online Application, click here.
Tomlinson Postdoctoral Fellowships
Tomlinson Postdoctoral Fellowships 2010-2011 Richard H. Tomlinson (PhD '48, McGill University) enjoyed a career in Chemistry that won him national recognition as a university teacher and success as an inventor and entrepreneur.
In the year 2000, he created an exceptional series of recruitment student awards with the aim of giving the finest young minds the opportunity to study at McGill University. The Tomlinson Postdoctoral Fellowships are for new postdoctoral scholars accepted into a postdoctoral research position at any department at McGill University.
Learn more about Richard H. Tomlinson and the Tomlinson Scholars.
For information on the Fellowships, click here.