Center for Ancient Middle Eastern Landscapes (CAMEL) Fellowship

The Center for Ancient Middle Eastern Landscapes (CAMEL) calls applicants for a one-year fellowship program for focused graduate student training and mentorship and increased engagement between the academic research and public outreach programs at the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures (ISAC). This program would be a profound professional career development opportunity for graduate students and early career scholars through public speaking practice, peer-reviewed publications, and networking with scholars and institutions with similar interests across campus and in the greater Chicago area.

2023-24 Theme: Modeling Movement in Ancient Landscapes

The movement of material and ideas determines a living versus a dead culture and people. Ancient landscapes are all formed through the impressions left by all kinds of movements, from the subtle unrecognizable movement of sound waves to the daily routes of village herders, the pilgrimage and trade routes, or the catastrophic flows of floods on the earth system. It is hard to imagine a research question about the past that does not involve inquiry into how matter and mind move between geographical locations. Nevertheless, understanding how people, their animals, and goods moved through the landscape in the past is notoriously tricky. Recent advances in Geographic Information Science (GIS) software have offered archaeologists and historians a new set of tools to model movement paths in the landscape. The proliferation of GIS movement modeling methods in archaeology has led to a parallel stream of debates about the applicability of these methods, which favor physical aspects of the land as opposed to sociocultural factors, to the exploration of past movement routes.

Eligibility

Applicants should be full-time graduate students or postdoctoral scholars at the University of Chicago or in the greater Chicago Area.

Deadline

September 18, 2023