Institute for Advanced Israel Studies Fellowship 2024-25

The Schusterman Center for Israel Studies at Brandeis University invites applications for the Institute for Advanced Israel Studies 2024-2025. The fellowship will be hybrid, consisting of virtual workshops and seminars, and an in-person conference in Spring 2025.

The theme of this year’s Institute will be Digital Humanities in Israel Studies. We will focus on scholarship that makes use of digital tools and artificial intelligence to study Zionist, Israeli, or Palestinian history, society and culture from the late 19th century to the present.

We will convene a group of scholars whose work considers what the digital age means for scholarship, and particularly for the study of Israeli and Palestinian material. Methods are shifting in a rapidly growing field, as the recent exponential growth of AI, digital mapping, distant reading, digital visualizations, large language modeling, data scraping, and a myriad of other new technologies are being applied to scholarship in the humanities. The scope of material available for research, with vast archives of online materials, is also changing in profound ways, raising additional questions. How does the availability of new digital materials and archives affect the tasks of writing history, interpreting literature, mapping, and analyzing culture?

Throughout the year, each fellow will present work in progress. Additionally, the cohort will read theoretical texts in digital studies from various disciplines to understand the advantages and the disadvantages (methodological, conceptual, and ethical) of the application of digital tools to Israel Studies.

We welcome applications from scholars in any career stage and in diverse disciplines, including history, geography, literature, sociology, anthropology, law, sociolinguistics, musicology, and architecture.