Theme: Language and Authority

The Fung Global Fellows Program reflects Princeton University’s commitment to engaging with scholars from around the world and inspiring ideas that transcend borders. The program brings exceptional international early-career faculty members working in the social sciences and the humanities to Princeton for a year of research, writing, and collaboration. It is administered by the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, which serves as a site for integration and joint activity across all of the University’s international and area programs.

Each year, the Fung Global Fellows Program will select six scholars from around the world to be in residence at Princeton for one academic year and to engage in research, writing, and collaboration
around a common theme. The program includes a public seminar series where the fellows will present their work to the University community. Fellowships will be awarded through a competitive application process to scholars employed outside the United States who have demonstrated outstanding scholarly achievement, exhibit unusual intellectual promise, and are still early in their careers.

This program is supported by a gift from William Fung, group chairman of Li & Fung, a Hong Kong-based multinational group of export and retailing companies. Fung earned a BSE in electrical engineering from
Princeton in 1970 and an MBA from the Harvard Graduate School of Business in 1972, and then began his career at the family firm. He joined Princeton’s Board of Trustees in 2009, and has previously supported Princeton’s groundbreaking financial aid program. “In this new age of globalization, Princeton should be even more involved in fostering scholarship everywhere it takes place,” Fung said. “Through
this gift, I hope to enable Princeton to become a stronger catalyst for developing new and exciting research and for creating international scholarly communities.”

Current Topic: Languages and Authority

In 2013-14, the program’s inaugural year, the fellows and the accompanying seminar series will focus on how languages interact with political, social, economic, and cultural authority.  Languages can
be powerful tools for expressing and asserting authority.  Yet they also constitute forms of authority in and of themselves (such as in the standardization and uniformity that they impose). Languages as
forms of authority are also contested, and language communities have often formed a basis for resisting authority. Possible topics for this cycle include the ways in which languages and language use interact with globalization, empire, decolonization, nation-state formation, nationalism, language policy, language ideology, social stratification, migration, commerce and trade, social and religious movements, and the sociology of knowledge production.

Application

The application deadline for the 2013-14 Fung Global Fellows Program
is November 1, 2012. An online form is available at  jobs.princeton.edu/applicants/Central?quickFindb407

Interested scholars whose research engages with the theme “Languages and Authority” and who meet the eligibility criteria as outlined below are invited to submit their application online by November 1, 2012.