Contact: Kathlin Smith
202-939-4754
Washington, DC, June 29, 2016-The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded CLIR $995,000 to support a program of CLIR/DLF Postdoctoral Fellowships in Data Curation for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. The program will fund a cohort of five fellows for two years at U.S. or Canadian institutions with strong programs in Latin American and/or Caribbean Studies, starting in July 2017.
Latin American and Caribbean Studies encompass modes of inquiry from numerous fields, including history, sociology, art, archaeology, literature, political science, geography, gender studies, and economics. The fellowships are designed to support international partnerships in the service of cross-disciplinary humanities research and in building greater capacity for digitizing original materials, for sharing related digital data, and for developing humanities computing infrastructure to sustain these resources.
“These new fellowships will enlarge the international scope of our existing data curation program while stimulating additional vital conversations about data curation within an established deeply interdisciplinary community of scholars facing critical challenges,” said Principal Investigator and CLIR Senior Program Officer Alice Bishop.
The fellowships for Latin American and Caribbean Studies will be integrated into CLIR’s 2017 Postdoctoral Program, including Postdoctoral Fellows in Academic Libraries; CLIR/DLF Postdoctoral Fellows in Data Curation for the Sciences and Social Sciences, who are supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation; and CLIR/DLF Postdoctoral Fellows in Data Curation for Medieval Studies, supported by the Mellon Foundation.
“Latin American and Caribbean Studies is a vibrant and exciting academic field, contributing significantly to the enrichment of scholarship and teaching, and our understanding of the complexity of a multifaceted cultural heritage,” said CLIR President Charles Henry. “We are grateful to The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for this opportunity to work with practitioners in this vibrant discipline in order to better understand the challenges of data curation and to assist in developing methods of long term preservation, access, and reuse of information integral to the humanities.”
CLIR launched its Postdoctoral Fellowship Program in 2004. To date, it has educated and placed 149 fellows at 67 host institutions across the United States and Canada.
CLIR will post fellowship openings in October 2016 at https://www.clir.org/fellowships/postdoc. The application deadline will be December 30, 2016, and awards will be announced in June 2017.
The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) is an independent, nonprofit organization that forges strategies to enhance research, teaching, and learning environments in collaboration with libraries, cultural institutions, and communities of higher learning.
The Digital Library Federation, founded in 1995, is a robust and diverse community of practice, advancing research, learning, and the public good through digital library technologies. DLF connects its parent organization, CLIR, to an active practitioner network, consisting of 139 member institutions, including colleges, universities, public libraries, museums, labs, agencies, and consortia. Among DLF’s NDSA-related initiatives are the eResearch Network, focused on data stewardship across disciplines, and the CLIR/DLF Postdoctoral Fellows program, with postdocs in data curation for medieval, early modern, visual studies, scientific, and social science data, and in software curation.
