The Humanities Research Center offers two Postdoctoral Fellowships in conjunction with the Spatial Humanities Initiative and in partnership with the Center for Research Computing: 1) A postdoctoral fellowship in Digital Scholarship focused on humanities and qualitative social sciences who offers technical and intellectual expertise to advance digital scholarship. The fellow also develops workshops for faculty and students on the use of digital methods and cyberinfrastructure in the humanities and qualitative social sciences. 2) A postdoctoral fellowship in Spatial Humanities focused on the theory, history, and/or humanistic practice of geospatial mapping and procedural modeling. The fellow develops his or her own research project, gives presentations to colleagues at Rice, assists the HRC in organizing a lecture series, and offers one course per year related to his or her research.
Spatial Humanities Initiative Fellows
2017-2019
Elisabeth Narkin | A. W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow
Ph.D. Art, Art History and Visual Studies, Duke University
Constructing Dynasty: Architecture and the French Royal Family
Elisabeth is an architectural historian of early modern France whose research focuses on the intersection of the domestic spaces of châteaux and the social spaces of court relationships. Her current project, Constructing Dynasty: Architecture and the French Royal Family, examines the manner in which the royal family's architecture projects, residential habits, and use of buildings--both independently and within the monarchy's territorial network--advanced a conception of the sixteenth-century monarchy as legitimate, enduring, and in touch with its subjects. With a focus on the royal children as central actors in the crown's long-term socio-political strategies, the project explores domestic architecture from the perspective of its users and argues that their relationship with buildings shaped the built environment as well as French politics. In addition to object-based inquiry and social history, Elisabeth deploys analytical tools like digital mapping and 3D modeling alongside spatial theory to understand spaces that physical changes and non-traditional sources might otherwise obscure.
Marie Saldaña | A. W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow
Ph.D. Architecture, UCLA
1767: Two Trips to the Northern Frontier of New Spain
Marie Saldaña received her PhD in Architecture at UCLA in 2015. She studies the interrelationship of geography and landscape with the built environment. Her current work focuses on the geographic, demographic, and architectural history of Texas and Northeastern Mexico in the Spanish colonial and early Mexican periods.