"Charles Warren Center Fellowship"

School:

Faculty of Arts and Sciences

Department/Area:

Charles Warren Center

Position Description

The 2026-27 Warren Center Faculty Fellowship will be on the theme of Commemorative Acts led by Tiya Miles (History) and Robin Bernstein (African and African American Studies and Women, Gender, & Sexuality).

The Warren Center, Harvard's research center for United States history, invites applications for a seminar on Commemorative Acts. Commemorations will abound in 2026 as the United States recognizes the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and the beginning of the American Revolution. This timing provides a rich occasion and context for examining commemoration as a national endeavor. Who is remembering what, and how? What is being erased, and why? What are the stakes of commemoration in the present? This Warren Center seminar aims to inspire new questions, highlight key issues, structure constructive dialogue across diverse viewpoints, and support wide-ranging works-in-progress at a consequential moment for national memory and history.

Our faculty seminar will convene scholars of the past, including academic historians and/or public historians, performance historians, and American Studies scholars whose work explores the making and meaning of public commemorations, or what we are calling "commemorative acts." We define commemorations as events, rituals, processes, material objects, and built environments through which a group endeavors to remember, and often honor, people, happenings, or values of the past. We will seek participants working at different scales, including some large-scale projects that consider the unit of the nation as well as narrower projects that focus on individual commemorations, especially ones that shed light on the nation as an entity.

Commemorative acts, often spurred by the experience or perception of loss, employ memorialization and public performance to reanimate, sustain, retain, transmit, or invent history. Commemorative acts work on the level of denotation and connotation, knowledge and affect, community and culture. These acts involve looking and listening, often live and in groups of people in public. They function through both facts and narratives - the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. Ephemeral or enduring, commemorative acts can be singular events such as the installation or removal of a statue, or ongoing events, as in a permanently-installed memorial.

Fundamentally, commemorations are crafted and staged engagements with history. Therefore, while this seminar welcomes all history-based methodologies, we highlight performance history. The field of performance studies offers well-developed critical tools with which to analyze key elements of commemorations, including physical space and place, audienceship, live bodies in motion, the persistence and erasure of memory, mourning and absence, silence, ritual, time and temporality, tourism, and repetition with difference.

Signaling boundaries through narrative, imagery, space, and performance, commemorative acts leave some people out even as they call others in, defining a "we" and a "they." For this reason, race, gender, and other categories of historical analysis are crucial to the intellectual work of this seminar. The co-conveners, both scholars of African American studies, will foreground issues that are prominent in this field, including the vicissitudes and difficulties of archives, family history and genealogy, and democracy. Because the Civil War is central to many current debates about monuments and historical memory, we expect that this war, along with slavery, abolition, and Reconstruction, will be vital to our discussions.

Uniting diverse viewpoints and historical methods at a key semiquincentennial, this seminar asks: why do commemorations matter? What do they do? How do they function in the modern nation/state? What is at stake in the creation and dissolution of commemorations? And finally, how can Harvard contribute to national conversations about acts that commemorate a past and chart a future?

Fellows will present their work in a seminar led by Tiya Miles (History) and Robin Bernstein (African and African American Studies and Women, Gender, & Sexuality). Applicants may not be degree candidates and should have a Ph.D. or equivalent. Fellows have library privileges and an office for the 9-month academic year. The Center encourages applications consistent with the seminar theme and qualified applicants who can contribute, through their research and service, to the excellence of the community. Stipends: individually determined according to fellow needs and Center resources, up to a maximum of $66,000. Note that recent average stipends have been in the range of $50,000.

Application deadline: January 7, 2026
Letters of recommendation deadline: January 9, 2026

For more information, see http://warrencenter.fas.harvard.edu/.

Basic Qualifications

Applicants may not be degree candidates and should have a Ph.D. or equivalent. Fellows have library privileges and an office for the 9-month academic year. The Center encourages applications consistent with the seminar theme and qualified applicants who can contribute, through their research and service, to the excellence of the community. Stipends: individually determined according to fellow needs and Center resources, up to a maximum of $66,000. Note that recent average stipends have been in the range of $50,000.

Special Instructions

PROJECT TITLE AND STATEMENT: Upload a three page project statement(double-spaced)) into the "Statement of Research" document slot. Do not attach lengthy materials compiled for other grant applications.

RECOMMENDATION LETTERS: Three letters of reference are required. Instructions will follow as you complete the electronic application. Deadline for recommendation letters is January 9, 2026.

Contact Information

Monnikue McCall
Executive Director
Charles Warren Center
Emerson Hall, 4th Floor
Cambridge, MA 02138
617-495-3591

Contact Email: momccall@fas.harvard.edu

Salary Range

$60,000 to $69,000

Minimum Number of References Required:

3