[Bilimsel Haber] The Fung Global Fellows Program: Current Topic: Languages and Authority (Princeton)

[Gonul Pultar]

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?quickFind=62407

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.