More info: here
The Sawyer Seminar and the Center for Documentary Research and Practice (CDRP) at Indiana University will award one Andrew W. Mellon (Sawyer Seminar) Postdoctoral Fellowship for a one-year appointment beginning July 1, 2016. The Fellow will receive a stipend of $45,000 for the year as well as health insurance. This Sawyer Seminar is interdisciplinary in nature, bringing together filmmakers, historians, legal scholars, film and media scholars, anthropologists, cognitive scientists, and journalists. It will consist of five 2-day conferences, hosted by Indiana University Cinema, and encompass film screenings, lectures, panels, and roundtables. Each conference will address the relationship between documentary and major historical transformations (colonialism, human/civil rights, neoliberalism, Arab Spring), examining how documentaries both reveal and shape socio-political change. Among others, we will explore the following questions: How do films made during historical transformations reveal a new understanding of the status of the nonfiction image? How do documentary filmmakers work with and for communities and do so not only during the initial release of the film but over the extended ‘life” of a film? How does accounting for the circulation of documentary films reveal the historical networks that shaped the reception of the films and the key players’ (individual, institutional, governmental) interests in the films? How are the dynamics between political urgency and ethical treatment often revealingly reconfigured in moments of historical transition? How have changes in media technologies related to documentary informed its role in shaping social imaginaries? In addition to pursuing a research project that speaks to central themes of the seminar, the Fellow will play an active role in the intellectual life of the Sawyer Seminar and help with organization. There will be a one-course teaching requirement (1/0 or 0/1) in the Fellow’s research area.