DH Positions at Michigan State University

The College of Arts & Letters and the College of Social Science at Michigan State University seek a group of culturally engaged digital arts and humanities scholars to join a transformative initiative to explore, interrogate, and cultivate Critical Diversity in a Digital Age. We are looking for creative, collaborative leaders in digital humanities and digital arts who think synthetically about scholarship, teaching, and creative endeavors. These new colleagues will join a group of faculty and students at Michigan State University with an energetic focus on humanities questions of race, inclusion, cultural preservation, global interconnectedness, and engaged scholarship.  They will be part of the Consortium for Critical Diversity in a Digital Age Research (CEDAR), which serves as an interdisciplinary catalyst for MSU scholars, artists, and teachers who work at the intersections of self/society, digital/material, technology/culture to advance leading-edge scholarship and creative activity that integrates diversity in a digital age.

Our aim is to lead a movement in humanities scholarship that engages the contemporary digital world with a discerning sense of critique rooted in ethical imagination and oriented toward creating more just communities. Three broad mission areas shape our initiative for Critical Diversity in a Digital Age: (1) To expose the limits of existing practices and structures of reality in order to interrogate the conditions under which they operate and thus to uncover what they enable and prevent; (2) To discern what is possible in the wake of this exposure so that we might imagine more just possibilities of engagement; (3) To enact practices of justice and freedom rooted in and animated by discerning critique.

As an anchoring intellectual disposition, critical diversity signals a perspective on “diversity” that goes beyond that term’s common yoking with “inclusion” to reflect on access to resources, to define problems and establish alliances, and to address actual systems of domination and oppression. The digital humanities can offer powerful tools for analysis, including various forms of digital reading, digital archives, data visualization, and electronic literature. Our initiative understands that these tools are not neutral, but must be interrogated, analyzed, and engaged through an abiding commitment to critical diversity.

In this first of a two-phase cluster hire, we seek applications from creative, energetic, and empathetic scholars at the Associate or Full Professor level with a demonstrated record of leadership, achievement, and mentoring who will help further frame, develop, and support our Critical Diversity in a Digital Age initiative.