Faculty Seminars
Faculty seminars offer time for colleagues across disciplines to interrogate concepts integral to contemporary humanistic inquiry and to examine their strategic deployment in cultural and scholarly discourse.
The seminars engage scholars who draw on myriad humanistic perspectives to enrich teaching, conversation, and research at Haverford. Faculty members may apply to join a seminar that would enhance their own research and teaching interests and afford them rewarding collaborative and interdisciplinary interactions.
Seminars are open to all tenure track and continuing appointment faculty across all disciplines.
NOTE: the Hurford Center will now also accept applications from current visiting faculty members who will still be teaching at Haverford in 2025-26. Any visitors admitted to the seminar will receive a stipend of $5000 rather than a course release.
Logistics
- Seminars convene regularly from September to May. The particular seminar’s meeting schedule is determined by the leader and seminar members, but all seminars are expected to meet approximately forty hours over the course of the year.
- In considering applications, the Hurford Center's Steering Committee will seek to honor specific interests while also providing the broadest opportunities for interdisciplinary faculty participation for each seminar. Recent past faculty seminar participation may be a factor in the process. Participants (usually no more than 7) include a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow whose expertise will directly contribute to the success of the seminar.
- The seminar presents opportunities for public exhibitions using College collections and other-sourced materials under the curatorial direction of the seminar participants and with the guidance of Matthew Seamus Callinan.
- Seminar participants receive a one-semester course release and a stipend for books or materials, and seminar leaders receive an additional stipend. For visitors participating in the seminar, they receive a course release stipend from HCAH instead.
- Financial and administrative support is provided by the Center for each seminar’s programmatic expenses, including books, videos, speaker fees, and refreshments.
- After the conclusion of the seminar, participants will fill out a seminar survey sent out by the program manager sharing their experiences.
- Upon completion of the seminar, each participant receives a $400 stipend that can be used for books or other research related expenses.
- Seminar leaders receive a stipend of $3000. This stipend is shared between the two leaders when co-led.
Join a Seminar
2025-26
“Waste:Life”
Leader: Craig Borowiak (Political Science)
Whether it’s CO2 emissions warming the planet or mountains of e-waste shipped to the Global South, waste has become a defining feature of the 21st-century Anthropocene. While waste is often associated with life’s destruction—oceanic dead zones, species extinction, toxicity, human and environmental collapse—the relationship between waste and life is far more complex. On one hand, waste is an inherent aspect of living processes: all organisms generate some form of waste, and some waste begets life. On the other hand, the scale of contemporary human waste has generated some intriguing scenarios. Recent studies, for example, have revealed that the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, that vast expanse of plastic waste in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, hosts a thriving and unique aquatic ecosystem. The very plastic waste that is destroying many forms of marine life is simultaneously nurturing others. Meanwhile, in South Asia, the endangered Greater Adjutant stork finds a perilous form of safety in urban dumps. It finds refuge in refuse. Even more unsettling is the discovery of microplastics in brain tissue and human embryos. Such examples challenge simplistic characterizations of waste as a problem while raising existential questions about the integrity of living beings.
This faculty seminar will explore the relationship between waste and life from multiple angles. It will inquire about the meaning of both concepts and about the symbolic regimes that maintain the boundaries between “living” and “wasting.” What do waste and life mean in different disciplinary and cultural contexts? Are those meanings shifting? Drawing from the emergent field of Discard Studies, the seminar is also designed to push beyond conventional waste management frameworks and to evoke broader reflection on the systems and power dynamics that generate, represent, and distribute both waste and life, often in ways that contribute to environmental injustice and colonial legacies. Relatedly, we will interrogate cultural logics of abjection and efficiency that render some life as essential and others as excessive, wasted, or destined for wastelands. From a different, more uplifting angle, we will explore creative and life-affirming repurposing of waste, whether through art, compost, engineering, or the circular economy.
The first half of the seminar will be organized around a core set of evocative case studies and theoretical readings (mostly from Discard Studies) to develop a shared vocabulary and common set of references. The content of the second half of the seminar will be devised collaboratively by seminar participants to reflect their individual interests and disciplinary expertise. In addition to textual materials, the seminar may incorporate film, multimedia sources, and local field visits.
Apply to Join
Deadline: October 17, 2024
Open to all tenured, tenure-track, continuing, and visiting faculty. Contact Zainab Saleh (zsaleh [at] haverford.edu) with any questions.
Please send a detailed account (1-2 pages) to Zainab Saleh (zsaleh [at] haverford.edu) outlining how your research and teaching would centrally engage the theme and the ways you imagine contributing to this interdisciplinary dialogue.
zsaleh [at] haverford.edu (Email Zainab Saleh )
Propose a Seminar
Seminar plans should define the topic and articulate the object of study, along with relevant issues, traditions, or methodologies to be addressed. The nature of seminars will vary considerably, depending on faculty interest and expertise. Some may be closely related to the seminar leader's scholarly interests while others may arise from new directions in the leader's intellectual development; some may be organized around particular themes or content while others may begin from methodological or theoretical questions.
Call for Proposals
Via email to hcah [at] haverford.edu
Deadline to apply: April 4, 2025
Current Seminar
2024-25
“Theorizing the Black Pacific: Race and Afro-Asian Connectivities from Past to Present”
Leaders: Ruodi Duan and Guangtian Ha
As much as the Afro-Atlantic, the world(s) of the Pacific Ocean have birthed powerful ideas of race and difference: race as imposed hierarchy, as a compelling device of global imagination, and as the basis of social mobilization. This faculty seminar is interested in exploring the possibilities of the “Black Pacific” as an analytical and geographic category to interrogate contested formations of race, ethnicity, and gender across national, regional, and continental framings. Whether drawing on theorizations of “comparative racialization” or echoing recent calls to excavate indigenous genealogies of Blackness, we consider it intellectually enriching and politically promising to examine alternative modes of inquiry and new forms of antiracist solidarity which emerge out of rigorous research on the Pacific as a global maritime space. While the seminar's focus is on the theoretical prospects of the "Black Pacific," we too consider it essential to include works that deal with global Blackness and comparative racialization in other regions that deserve more scholarly and public attention (e.g., in Latin America). We welcome participants from any and all disciplines and those without or with numerous disciplines.
For a more extended discussion of the questions the seminar plans to raise, download the full seminar description