Call for Applications: Teaching Fellow

The Penn Program in Environmental Humanities (PPEH) at the University of Pennsylvania invites applications for a one-year graduate fellowship. We seek applicants whose research, teaching, and public engagements support and complement PPEH’s core commitments:

1) broadly interdisciplinary, collaborative inquiry across the arts and sciences

2) arts-driven inquiry into place, particularly our campus and the City of Philadelphia as well as urban ecology in other global contexts

3) public engagement, particularly in and with environmental justice communities and concerns

4) the creation and growth of “living archives” via practices of “urgent collection”

The Teaching Fellowship is being offered for the first time this year. The Fellow is expected to participate actively in the Program’s signature public environmental humanities projects, in Philadelphia and beyond. To learn more about current active projects which include My Climate Story, Futures Beyond Refining, and Ecotopian Toolkit, please visit the projects’ pages on the program’s website. Candidates’ application materials will explicitly consider their commitment to public engagements and how their research and teaching intersect with community-based participatory research on the environment and climate and sustainability literacy more generally. 

The Fellowship carries a stipend of $42,000 plus health insurance. During their year in residence, the Fellow will in fall and spring semesters mentor a small group of undergraduate public research interns. In the spring semester, the Fellow has the opportunity to teach their own undergraduate Public Environmental Humanities seminar.  Additionally, this fellowship requires participation in PPEH’s Working Wednesdays, a weekly lunchtime seminar series. The Fellow will present their own publicly engaged research in that series and is expected to attend all public-facing PPEH events, including special lectures, Working Wednesdays, and gatherings of the Oxford-Penn-Toronto International Doctoral Cluster in Environmental Humanities. This fellowship is open to currently enrolled graduate students at the University of Pennsylvania.

For further information about the Program, visit us at ppehlab.org

Deadline for all application materials, including transcripts and letters of recommendation: March 15, 2022.

The Penn Program in Environmental Humanities is strongly committed to Penn’s Action Plan for Faculty Diversity and Excellence and to creating a more diverse faculty (for more information see: http://www.upenn.edu/almanac/volumes/v58/n02/diversityplan.html.) The University of Pennsylvania is an Equal Opportunity Employer. Minorities/Women/Individuals with disabilities/Protected Veterans are encouraged to apply.


Call for Applications

Application deadline: March 15, 2022

To apply, please submit the following via email to director@ppehlab.org:

  • 1000-word research statement. This statement introduces your dissertation, planned dissertation, or M.A./M.S project and indicates how it intersects with the environmental humanities. Please consider how this work might foster collaboration across disciplines and might engage audiences beyond the academy.    
  • 500-word statement on how you envision your participation in one of PPEH’s ongoing public research projects. 
  • 250-word statement on your teaching and mentoring philosophy and practices.
  • 250-word statement describing a possible seminar on public environmental humanities to be taught in spring 2023
  • C.V.

All documents should be submitted as a single PDF, with the file name <PPEHgrad_your Last name_First name.pdf> (e.g., PPEHgrad_Franklin_Ben.pdf)

Also required:

One confidential letter of recommendation from your dissertation advisor or graduate chair. Please ask your referee to email their letter to director@ppehlab.org no later than the application deadline, March 15, 2022.