Apply: WAC Clearinghouse New Scholar Fellowships

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Dear Students and Colleagues:

We are very pleased to announce three WAC Clearinghouse New Scholar Fellowships for the coming year. This is our second year of offering these opportunities to work with editorial teams for the Clearinghouse. Please see this document for descriptions of this year’s Will Hochman, Charles Bazerman, and Susan H. McLeod New Scholar Fellowships. These opportunities come with a stipend of $1,000 for 12 months of work.

The call also provides instructions for applying; these opportunities are open to new and early-career scholars. Preference will be given to doctoral students who are in good standing in their doctoral programs and to full- or part-time faculty or independent scholars who have graduated within the past five years.

The deadline for applying is Friday, Sept. 20, 2024. If you have questions, please reach out to Ann Blakeslee at ablakesle.

We look forward to receiving many applications for these terrific opportunities!

The WAC Clearinghouse Leadership Team

WAC Clearinghouse New Scholar Fellowships 2024-25

The WAC Clearinghouse is delighted to announce fellowship opportunities for new and early career scholars who are interested in expanding their editorial and administrative experience through involvement in one or more of our publishing venues and/or initiatives.

The fellowship positions listed below are 12-month appointments that carry a stipend of $2,000 (the stipend will be paid when the work for the fellowship has been completed). Clearinghouse fellows will take on at least one project to advance the work of the Clearinghouse and will have opportunities to shadow members of their assigned editorial team to learn about publishing. Prior to starting the appointment, fellows will be informed of the expectations of the fellowship, anticipated work schedule, and deliverables.

Eligibility: Fellows may not be members of the WAC Clearinghouse editorial board or editorial team. Doctoral students must be in good standing at an accredited institution. Preference will be given to doctoral students and to full- or part-time faculty or independent scholars who have graduated within the past five years.

To Apply:

  1. Submit a statement of interest (1000-word maximum) to Ann Blakeslee (ablakesle) that directly identifies the project or projects to which you wish to be assigned (refer to the 2024-25 Fellowship Project Roster below) and that explains your interest in and emerging ideas for contributing to the project or projects you’ve selected.

  2. Attach a CV that includes the names and contact information for up to three references who are able to speak to your scholarship and/or service to your home institution or to the field.

Your statement and CV should be included as attachments (Word or PDF only). The deadline to apply is Friday, September 20, 2024.

Applications will be screened by representatives from the WAC Clearinghouse and editors from each publication, and selected applicants will be contacted for an interview via Zoom by September 30. Interviews will take place in early October, and fellowship decisions will be announced no later than October 18, 2024. For additional questions, please contact Ann Blakeslee, Associate Publisher for Books, WAC Clearinghouse (ablakesle).

2024-25 Fellowship Project Roster

Landmark Publications in Writing Studies – The Will Hochman New Scholar Fellowship

This 12-month funded fellowship has a stipend of $2,000. It consists of a primary project and work as an associate editor of the series:

  • The primary project involves conducting a series of Zoom-based interviews with established writing studies scholars about their experiences and advice regarding the development of scholarly work. The interviews will focus on the development of journal articles, monographs, edited collections, video, and podcasts as well as the experiences the scholars went through as they worked to publish their projects. The project will be published in a special section of the WAC Repository on the WAC Clearinghouse.

  • Working with the Landmark series editor and editorial review board members to identify new projects for potential inclusion in the series.

The goals for this project are to provide a rich set of resources for writing studies scholars who seek to publish in areas where they might have little or no experience and to increase the range of books included in the Landmarks series.

Regular meetings will be held with the fellow to develop a schedule, identify interview candidates, monitor progress, and offer professional advice. The meetings will occur at least once a month and communication via email and/or text is expected to be a regular feature of the fellowship experience.

WAC Clearinghouse Repository – The Charles Bazerman New Scholar Fellowship

The Clearinghouse Repository houses multiple significant archival projects—including theDartmouth Exhibit, The Digital WPA, and AI Text Generators and Teaching Writing, among others—and it will include new projects in the near future. The New Scholar Fellow would work with us in:

  • Maintaining and building exhibit projects, including the Oregon State University WIC Archive, with a projected archive of some 22,000-25,000 archive files (currently in-progress; anticipated release fall 2024).

  • Participating in regular meetings with members of the OSU project team and contributing to emerging organizational and marketing efforts in support of the project.

  • Contributing to the revision and updating of AI Text Generators and Teaching Writing.

  • Researching and creating a guidebook on creating and maintaining WAC Clearinghouse Repository Exhibits. This guidebook project will include reviewing relevant methods literature, conducting interviews with several digital archive scholars on their experiences creating and maintaining projects, and, ultimately, creating the guidebook itself with the goal of publishing it in the WAC Clearinghouse Repository as a reference for prospective curators.

This 12-month funded fellowship has a stipend of $2,000. The 12-month window will allow the fellow time to develop relationships with key Exhibit project teams and, likely beginning in January 2025, to research and draft the Repository Guide for Creating and Maintaining Exhibits.

Goals for these projects include building a new exhibit project (OSU WIC Archive), collaborating on the AI Text Generators and Teaching Writing project, drafting the Guide, and networking/establishing relationships with external scholars as well as members of the WAC Repository and the Clearinghouse leadership team. Ultimately, the goals include publication of the OSU digital exhibit, revision of the AI TG and TW exhibit, and a published Guide.

Precarity and Contingency and Academic Labor – The Susan H. McLeod New Scholar Fellowship

The Precarity and Contingency book series and the journal Academic Labor: Research and Artistry share overlapping readerships, as well as pools for drawing contributors and reviewers. Together through these two sites, we aim to provide scholarly/research/publication homes for labor researchers who might otherwise have difficulty placing their material. Yet because the field of Labor Studies is so diffuse (and its boundaries are so contested even by people who identify themselves into it), finding the people who produce and read this kind of research is challenging. Therefore, the primary work of this project is to:

  • Track the locations of Labor Studies research and people and help us develop a database of departments/programs, organizations, conferences, social media networks, and so on that should serve both promotional and recruiting purposes. A more systematic effort to find and compile these locations of research and people would be hugely valuable for the series, the journal, and scholar stakeholders. The editors will also support the fellow in publishing or co-publishing this work with the Center for the Study of Academic Labor at Colorado State University.

  • Use the knowledge attained about these various departments, organizations, etc. to help the series and journal editors develop promotional and recruiting materials. The efforts of the Fellow would expand the writer and reader base for these WAC Clearinghouse publications, and thus enlarge the reach of both our publications and the WAC Clearinghouse as a whole.

  • Draft the materials that result from the research.

  • Finally, we would welcome the Fellow into our consideration/decision-making/review processes about submissions.

The heart of the project fits comfortably into 12 months, and the Fellow will receive a $2,000 stipend. The primary goal of this Fellowship is to expand and document the promotional and recruiting bases for the ALRA and P&C and use that work to tailor promotional and recruiting materials based on what we learn from the process of building the database. The Fellow will learn in very concrete terms all the different places where labor research happens and use that exposure to build their own knowledge of the field. The Fellow also will learn about recruiting techniques and tactics for scholarly venues—and one of the benefits of the combined ALRA/P&C position is that they will see two different versions of this.

The primary deliverable will be a database of programs, organizations, conferences, social media networks, and the like where academic labor researchers convene that will serve as channels for both promotion of our publications and recruitment of submissions, reviewers, and editorial board members. A second deliverable is a draft of marketing materials to use in those channels.

Dr. Kristen Welch, Assistant Professor of English, Spartanburg Methodist College

Associate Publisher for Marketing and Advancement, WAC Clearinghouse