ICAST Summer Humanities Fellowship

ICAST Summer Humanities Fellow

Applications Closed. Upcoming Ancticipated Deadline April 2026.

The Institute for Community and Society Transformation (ICAST), in partnership with the OU Arts & Humanities Forum, announces a new opportunity designed to introduce explicitly humanistic perspectives into the work of ICAST: the ICAST Summer Humanities Fellowship. As one of the Research Vertical Institutes within the Office of the Vice President for Research and Partnerships (OVPRP), ICAST’s mission is to promote research and creative activity at OU that helps to reduce inequity and forge new pathways toward positive societal transformation through community-engaged research and creative activity that advances health and well-being, social justice, education, and technological and workforce adaptations.

The ICAST Summer Humanities Fellowship aims to provide a humanistic perspective on the priorities of ICAST, applying humanities questions and methodologies to ICAST’s initiatives. For Summer 2025, the Fellowship theme aligns with the ICAST Initiative “Technology and Society.” We invite fellows whose long-term research project addresses one or more of the following questions through a humanistic perspective:

What is “technology”? How has it been conceptualized at different times in human history and/or across the globe? How do new technologies perpetuate longstanding cultural patterns, and how do they challenge them?
How do the opportunities of new technologies change depending on who we are and where we’re located in time or space? How is it related to human striving and flourishing?
How are threats of new technologies experienced by humans in different time periods or different cultures? How are they felt, sensed, or described? How has new technology shaped current social and cultural issues?
What are the ethical, legal, and social implications of new technologies? In particular, how do new technologies impact truth, trust, and democracy; safety and security; and privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties?

The ICAST Summer Humanities Fellowship will support two months of research, writing, or other scholarly activity in support of any long-term research project that asks humanistic/interpretive questions or uses humanistic methodologies around the topic of Technology and Society.

The selected fellow will receive $8,500 that can be used during June/July 2025 as summer stipend, research travel, supplies, or student support.

Applications must be submitted by email to humanities.forum@ou.edu by 4/20/2025.

Eligibility Criteria

Any member of the OU regular faculty, regardless of discipline, whose research falls solidly within the frameworks of humanistic and/or interpretive scholarship.

Selection preference will be given to faculty who have achieved tenure, given the support for Junior Faculty already provided by the VPRP through the Junior Faculty Fellowships.

The faculty member who is selected for this fellowship will be expected not to teach during the months of June or July, so as to focus all of their attention on their research and writing.

Proposal Preparation and Submission

Proposals must be single spaced and use a font of 11 points or larger. Page margins should be 1” on all four sides.

Please be certain that you have included all required components, in order. Late or incomplete applications will not be reviewed.  

Proposals must include each of the following components and be submitted as a single PDF file. Email completed applications to <humanities.forum@ou.edu> with the subject line “[LAST NAME] - ICAST HUMANITIES FELLOW APPLICATION”.

Cover Sheet: Complete the proposal cover sheet (PDF) including 200 word project abstract.
Project Narrative (limited to 3 pages, formatted as described above): Keep in mind that your proposal will be read by a diverse group of faculty across the arts and humanities disciplines, some of whom might have limited knowledge about your proposed project. Therefore, the project narrative should keep jargon to a minimum. Sending us a book proposal will not be competitive. The following six sections (A-E) should be clearly delineated in the Project Narrative:
- Section A: Intellectual Merit and impact (scholarly and/or public)
  - Describe the significance of the proposed project. Write an overview of the project, with special attention to the main research questions or problems you are investigating. What is your main argument (or arguments)? Importantly, explain how your proposed project draws inspiration from existing scholarship and joins relevant scholarly conversations in your field. How will your project contribute to the development of knowledge or expand creative activity in your field? Give specific examples of the various lines of work with which you are in dialogue and which you are seeking to advance. However, when writing this section, please keep in mind that you are writing about these conversations for an audience of scholars outside your field, so make sure your response is legible across broad audiences in the interpretive arts and humanities.
- Section B: Methods and organization:
  - Describe in detail the methods that you will be utilizing and how these methods will provide you with the information you need to answer your research question. How will you go about collecting and analyzing this information? If you are primarily writing up previously collected research, the committee expects less information here and more information for how your writing time will be organized under section C (“work plan”).
  - For book projects, explain how the final manuscript will be organized, including brief chapter outlines. For other kinds of projects, make sure the committee understands how your scholarly effort around the project is organized (eg. Paratextual materials for a translation work, technologies developed for a computational humanities project, etc.). We need enough detail so that we know what the project is about, but not so much detail that it overwhelmes the other five sections.
- Section C: Work plan during June/July 2025
  - Provide a complete timeline for the project, and make clear the current project status. Describe in detail the portion of the project that will be supported by the fellowship, including where the work will be conducted and how you will be spending your supported time. The committee is looking for clearly stated and achievable project milestones, especially in support of writing time. If the Summer Fellowship will not take a project to completion, explain your plan for finishing the work.
- Section D: Competencies, skills, and access
  - Discuss how the proposed project aligns with and extends your demonstrated expertise and track record (creative activities and/or program of research and scholarship). How does the project relate to what you have already achieved, and in what ways does it move your scholarship in a new direction? Specify any language competencies or digital technology experience needed for the project.
  - If relevant, explain your plans for accessing necessary materials. If working with Human Subjects, what kinds of institutional and local/community permissions have been secured? If working in archives, collections, or other institutions, what arrangements for access have been made?
- Section E: Final product and circulation
  - Explain the intended project outcome(s), with special attention to plans for publication/circulation. If the project has a digital component/outcomes, indicate how that digital project will be sustained beyond the period of the grant. Make sure to explain why your plans for final product and circulation align with your intended audience(s) for your work.
Bibliography (2 page limit): In addition to sources directly cited in the proposal, include in your bibliography any primary and secondary sources that relate directly to your project. The committee will be reviewing the bibliography for relevant works not only to your topical specialization but also to your theoretical and/or methodological approach. The bibliography must not exceed two pages, with formatting specifications consistent with the rest of the proposal (above).
Statement of Contribution to Fellowship Theme "Technology and Society" (maximum of 1 page): How does your long-term scholarly project help bring a humanities perspective to ICAST's mission to better understand technology opportunities and threats as they impact human society? As described above, we are particularly interested in projects that help us think about our digital age in ways that are deeply contextualized through humanitiy's historical and global experience.
Budget and Budget Rationale (maximum of 1 page): The applicant should include an itemized budget with a compelling narrative for how funds will be spent and why they are needed. It is especially important to demonstrate a direct linkage between budget items and the proposed activity. The support can be used for any legitimate purpose associated with the project if justified in the proposal, including in its entirety as a summer stipend to support writing. Note that proposals must adhere to State of Oklahoma travel guidelines, student stipend rates, data collection practices, tuition, equipment, and support for staff.
Curriculum Vitae (limit 2 pages): Submit a two-page curriculum vitae. The committee is particularly interested in reviewing your vita for information that will help establish your competency for successfully completing the proposed project with the funding requested.
Supplementary Documentation (no page limit, but content limited to the items listed): These items are project-specific, and not all proposals will include them.
- Description of plans for review from OU or Tribal IRB, if approporiate

Proposal Review

The Forum’s Faculty Advisory Committee will review all proposal materials in consultation with the ICAST Leadership. Proposals will be evaluated for scholarly excellence and potential for substantive contribution to the mission of ICAST.

Post-Award Requirements

By September 30, 2025, the fellow is required to submit a brief (1–2 page) report on work achieved during the period of the Fellowship.
The ICAST Summer Humanities Fellow is expected to apply for ICAST Affiliate Status, and to attend ICAST events during the 2025-26 academic year.
The ICAST Summer Humanities Fellow is expected to present on their research for an ICAST audience at some point during the 2025-26 academic year.
All written publications (whether in hard copy or electronic form) should acknowledge the support of the Institute for Community and Society Transformation the OU Arts & Humanities Forum, and the Office of the Vice President for Research and Partnerships.

Past Awardees

2025 ICAST Summer Humanities Fellow

ICAST THEME "Technology and Society"

Hunter Heyck (Professor, Department of the History of Science, Medicine and Technology)

From climate change to online disinformation to pandemic disease to populist revolts against expertise and globalization, many of the great issues facing us today are socio-technical challenges. That is, they are the products of our past choices, embedded in the technological systems that give shape to how we work, play, live, and love. Solving such problems is never a simple matter, for technology and society each make each other, all the time. Artifice: Creating a Chosen World explores this relationship between technology and society from Gutenberg to genomics explores the relationship between technology and society from Gutenberg to genomics, automata to AI. Its central thesis is that we have created an increasingly artificial, chosen world in which our encounters with ‘first nature’ are almost always mediated by layer upon layer of artifice. This world of artifice I call a ‘chosen world’ because, time and again, we have used our technologies to replace the givens of nature with the choices of humans. This framing connects the history of technology to social and cultural history—to the world of human goals, values, and choices—and to the history of our ideas about and interactions with Nature. Because of its focus on the theme of choice, Artifice engages with the core ethical and social questions posed by ICAST. What does choice mean in a world of large-scale technological infrastructures that make some choices so much easier than others? Whose choices matter, and how does choice operate? Do choices made in initial design outweigh those made by end users? Do modern technological systems extend meaningful choices to more people, or do they concentrate not only wealth but the power to choose in fewer hands? These are the core questions that animate Artifice.

2024 ICAST Summer Humanities Fellow

ICAST THEME "Access and Opportunity"

Cedric Tolliver (Associate Professor, Department of English)

Spook(ed) analyzes the complexities and contradictions of the nearly seventy-year project of racial integration into the U.S. state aparatus through a reading of African American political memoirs and spy thrillers. While rarely considered in African American literary fiction and mainstream thrillers, this integration and its tangle of issues (racism, patriotism, political persuasion, and geopolotics) are thoughtfully explored in African American memoirs and thrillers. Ultimately, Spook(ed) tells the understudied and overlooked story of African Americans who used their access to opportunity within the government to bend a state apparatus toward serving a population, African Americans, that had been viewed almost exclusively as an internal subversive threat for most of the state's nearly two hundred and fifty years of existence. Spook(ed) provides fresh insight on the story of the Civil Rights movement and the African American struggle for access to opportunity in this country. As it is traditionally told, the story of Civil Rights is of a social movement with moral putting outside pressure on the government to realize the ideals of its founding by enacting legislation and codifying those laws in judicial decisions that extend equal protection before the law to African Americans. What this familiar story overlooks, however, is the integration of the government itself and how African Americans leveraged this newfound access to exert internal pressure from within the government to realize social change. Most of this work took place, if not in secrecy, then at least away from the public’s eye. In this way, I see my project as contributing to ICAST's priority areas by shedding new light on how African Americans and their allies confronted and overcame racial barriers to opportunity in the diplomatic service and other areas of the national security state apparatus.