The HRC awards up to three postdoctoral fellowships for two-year appointments. The fellowships are designed to encourage interdisciplinary scholarship and teaching. Fellows teach two courses per academic year, and are expected to make significant progress in their research.

The deadline for 2012-14 fellows has passed; we are no longer accepting applications.

See publications from our past postdoctoral fellows here

2010-12 Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellows

	Olivia Banner, Ph.D. in English Literature (2010), University of California, Los Angeles Banner's dissertation, "The Genetic Imaginary: Cultural and Scientific Narratives of Human Variation in the Postgenomic Era," examines race, disability, sex, and sexuality in light of scientific knowledges and technologies that have emerged with and since the Genome Projects. At Rice, she will expand this into a book on the construction of the postgenomic subject through the convergence of old and new media. Her next project focuses on the expansion of neuroscientific discourse throughout the humanities and social sciences and will investigate its naturalization of social categories of variation and affect. She is also working on an article on poetics in an age of biolabor.
	Michael Gavin, Ph.D. in English (2010), Rutgers University Gavin's dissertation, "Print and the Cultures of Criticism: Literary Factionalism in England, 1660-1730," examines how poetic controversies gave shape to various conceptions of literary community and print culture in England during this period. During his time at Rice, Gavin will explore the relationships between criticism and other forms of writing, including satire and the early novel, while focusing on the careers of writers and publishers whose work spans generic, social, and national boundaries.
	Sarah Levin-Richardson, Ph.D. in Classical Archaeology (2009), Stanford University Building from her doctoral dissertation, Levin-Richardson’s monograph Beyond Desire: Romans and their Erotic Art explores the intersection of eroticism, desire, and viewing in the Roman period. This project re-examines the erotic art of three (in)famous buildings—Pompeii’s brothel, the Suburban Baths at Pompeii, and an elite villa in Rome (the Villa della Farnesina)—arguing that social status was key to the ways in which Roman erotic art provoked desire and other emotions. In addition to working on this manuscript while at Rice, she is preparing a series of articles on male and female uses of obscenity in ancient graffiti and a co-authored article revising the traditional active-male/passive-female model of ancient sexuality