Apply for the 2020-2021 Praxis Cohort!

Calling UVA graduate students! The spring semester is just beginning, but it’s never too early to think about next year. Applications are now open for the 2020-2021 cohort. Applications are due March 1st, 2020. Consider spending some time with us!

If you’re interested in learning more about the fellowship or have questions about anything you read below, please consider attending the information session for the program on Wednesday, February 19th from 11AM-12PM in New Cabell Hall 236. You are, of course, welcome to write to Brandon Walsh separately and/or sooner for an individual meeting to discuss your application.

The Praxis Program is a radical re-imagining of the annual teaching and training we offer in the Scholars’ Lab. This fellowship supports a team of six University of Virginia PhD students from a variety of disciplines, who work collaboratively on a shared digital humanities project. Under the guidance of Scholars’ Lab faculty and staff, Praxis fellows conceive, develop, publish, and promote a digital project over the course of an academic year. Praxis is a unique and well-known training program in the international digital humanities community. Our fellows blog about their experiences and develop increased facility with project management, collaboration, and the public humanities, even as they tackle (most for the first time, and with the mentorship of our faculty and staff) new programming languages, tools, and digital methods. Praxis aims to prepare fellows with digital methodologies to apply both to the fellowship project and their future research.

Our first two cohorts designed and built Prism, a digital tool for crowd-sourced humanities interpretation, visualization, and textual analysis. Our third and fourth cohorts re-imagined Ivanhoe, a WordPress theme enabling collaborative criticism through roleplay. Our fifth cohort explored sonification of humanities data with the project Clockwork. More recently, cohorts have worked on Dash-Amerikan, a social media ecology of the Kardashian family], and UVA Reveal, an augmented reality project that layers contextual information on contested public spaces on UVA’s campus, and Unclosure, a project that explores the possibilities that the public domain holds for research, pedagogy, and play.

Beginning as a 2011-2013 pilot project supported by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to UVa Library’s Scholarly Communication Institute, the Praxis Program is now generously supported by UVa Library and GSAS. The Praxis Program is a core module of PHD+, a university-wide initiative to prepare PhD students across all disciplines for long-term career success. The work Praxis Fellows undertake over the course of their fellowship year may be submitted in partial fulfillment of the practicum requirement for UVA’s Graduate Certificate in Digital Humanities.

The Praxis fellowship replaces recipients’ teaching responsibilities for the academic year. Fellows are expected to devote 10 hours per week in the Scholars’ Lab. Fellows join our vibrant community, have a voice in intellectual programming for the Scholars’ Lab, and can make use of a dedicated graduate space in the Lab offices.

Eligibility

All University of Virginia doctoral students working within or committed to humanities disciplines are eligible to apply. We particularly encourage applications from women, LGBT students, and people of color, and will be working to put together an interdisciplinary and intellectually diverse team.

Applicants must be enrolled full time in the year for which they are applying. In addition, applicants must be capable of attending weekly in-person meetings in both the fall and spring semesters of their fellowship year.

Applicants must still be drawing upon their regular funding packages as part of their doctoral program. I.e. students will typically be in years 2-5 of their program during the year the fellowship will be held.

N.b. - praxis students are not expected to come in with particular technical training or experiences - we cover that over the course of the fellowship year! Prior experience with digital technology is only one part of an application and should not keep anyone from applying. Everyone brings something different to the team, and your strengths in critical thinking about media, collaboration, project development, and more could be great ways for an application to shine. Concerned students are encouraged to reach out to Brandon Walsh, our Head of Graduate Programs, to discuss their backgrounds or eligibility.

How to Apply

The application process for Praxis is simple! You apply individually, and we assemble the team, through a process that includes group interviews and input from peers. To start, we only ask for a letter of intent (roughly 1-2 pages single-spaced). The letter should include:

• the applicant’s research interests;
• summary of the applicant’s plan for use of digital technologies in your research;
• summary of what skills, interests, methods the applicant will bring to the Praxis Program;
• summary of what the applicant hopes to gain as a Praxis Fellow;
• and your availability on the days we’ve identified for sixty-minute group interviews - March 23rd from 1-3pm or March 24th from 10-11. We’re aiming for a quicker process this year by announcing those group interview times in advance, though they may be subject to change if scheduling difficulties arise.

Questions about Praxis Fellowships and the application process should be directed to Brandon Walsh. Completed application materials can be uploaded through the GSAS application portal. Please do consider this application to be part of a process - the beginning of a conversation about how we can work together. We highly encourage students to write to Brandon Walsh to express their interest and (once an application has been submitted) to let us know you have applied. Together we can begin to discuss how the Lab can be a part of your time here, with Praxis or otherwise.