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Co-Teaching Fellowship

Humanities Center Co-Teaching Fellowships (Applications Now Closed)

The University of Pittsburgh Humanities Center is pleased to invite applications for Co-Teaching Fellowships. This fellowship has three primary goals: 1) to create innovative curricular offerings that foster excellence in undergraduate research; 2) to support thinking together and working together across disciplinary lines among faculty in the humanities; and 3) to connect fellows with the multidisciplinary networks of the Humanities Center. This year, we are once again calling for applications that connect to an annual theme. In 2024-25, our theme will be “Method?” Please see our announcement of this theme here for further details.

Fellows will participate in the intellectual life of the Center throughout the 2024-25 academic year, and they will share their work with the Humanities Center community. Applicants for this fellowship should work in pairs to propose a new co-taught undergraduate course. Fellowship recipients will each receive one course release during 2024-25 to develop the new class. In 2025-26, they will then receive one further course release to support an initial offering of the co-taught course. (One faculty member will receive teaching credit as usual for teaching the course; the second will have one course bought out by the fellowship; the teaching load and support for the pair of faculty colleagues will be identical even as the accounting will be different.) There is also an option to teach the course as an overload for $4500. Following this initial pilot, faculty participating in this curricular innovation program will then be able to offer the course together as and when they wish by co-scheduling the class. (In co-scheduling, the minimum enrollment of the course would double, but the opportunity to continue co-teaching would remain.) The Humanities Center is committed to creating a multidisciplinary humanities environment incorporating a diversity of experiences, identities, and disciplines.

Eligibility. Successful applicants for the fellowship must be faculty members on continuing contract at the University of Pittsburgh, which includes appointment stream and tenure stream faculty. Applications should be authored by two faculty based in different departments. Additionally, both faculty should be physically in residence in Pittsburgh during the 2024-25 academic year of the fellowship, and they both commit to participating in the intellectual life of the Center. Colleagues who have previously held a Humanities Center Co-Teaching Fellowship are eligible to apply again after five years, for work on a new project.

Application Requirements. Applications for a Humanities Center Co-Teaching Fellowship must include the following:

  1. A syllabus proposal describing the class to be designed while fellows (no more than 600 words);
  2. An account of how the proposed class would benefit from the different disciplinary perspectives of the co-teaching faculty (no more than 300 words)
  3. A description of how this course would contribute to existing curriculum and also do something new (no more than 300 words);
  4. An account of how the course would foster excellence in undergraduate research (no more than 300 words);
  5. A discussion of how this project would contribute to the 2024-25 Humanities Center theme of “Method?” (no more than 300 words);
  6. The Humanities Center is committed to fostering a multidisciplinary humanities environment incorporating a diversity of experiences, identities, and disciplines. Applicants are invited to articulate how they and their project would contribute to this goal (no more than 300 words).
  7. A current CV for each member of the proposed co-teaching team indicating whether the proposed project has received support in the past (no more than three pages for each CV);
  8. A syllabus from a previously taught course from each member of the proposed co-teaching team demonstrating - perhaps with the addition of short annotations - their approaches to syllabus design (no more than four pages for each syllabus);

Selection Criteria. Applications will be assessed by the Steering Committee of the Humanities Center. In that review of applications, the following criteria will be used to rank proposals:

  1. The thoughtfulness of curricular design both past and proposed in the application;
  2. The clarity with which the application lays out the co-teaching project to be pursued;
  3. The potential impact of the co-teaching project on undergraduate research;
  4. The likelihood that the project and the applicant would make a significant contribution to the theme;
  5. The likelihood that the co-teaching project would not only benefit from the specific cross-departmental collaboration it proposes but also contribute to a multidisciplinary humanities environment incorporating a diversity of experiences, identities, and disciplines.
  6. The record and career trajectories of the applicants, taking into account relative advantages and constraints on resources for the proposed project and over the course of the applicants' careers.

Deadline. Applications must be submitted by Monday, October 9, 2023.

Submission. Apply here.

Questions. For any questions, please contact the Co-Directors of the Humanities Center, Carla Nappi (nappi@pitt.edu) and David Marshall (dlm91@pitt.edu).