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About

The Interdisciplinary Exploration and Scholarship (IDEAS) Fellowship reimagines how we learn across disciplines at Emory.

IDEAS created sidecar courses, innovative interdisciplinary courses focused on a point of connection between two disciplines. Examples include Thinking Through Language (French and Italian & NBB) and Power of Black Self-Love (AAS & ILA). IDEAS has worked with On Recent Development by Emory Researchers (ORDER) to create the course, "What Does it Mean to be Human?" Finally, IDEAS has worked with Residence Life to have Fellows in Residence in Turman Hall to immerse first years in the liberal arts.
Fellows create community through weekly lunches with faculty and invited guests. IDEAS further cultivates community within Emory through Professors at Kaldi’s Getting Coffee and Take a Professor to Lunch, bringing together hundreds of students and faculty members to have interdisciplinary conversations on campus and beyond.
IDEAS collaborates both within and outside the Emory community to transform the educational experience. Through Story Circle events, individuals are empowered to share their stories and perspectives. The Innovation Fund provides grants for student groups to fund interdisciplinary activities; two examples include the Emory Arts Underground Showcase and Emory Sustainability Case Competition. Finally, we’ve worked directly with students in Clarkston and in the community.

What We Do

Who We Are

IDEAS brings together undergraduate students from any major who want to learn to think across and between disciplines and who want to make their own liberal arts experience more coherent. Students enter the fellowship as sophomores and may remain throughout their college careers.

During their tenure, IDEAS Fellows serve as ambassadors to the broader student body and as catalysts for liberal learning through activities that promote and encourage the four goals of the program:

  1. To understand and implement the core values of a liberal education: independent thinking, self-reflection, and the capacity to understand questions and issues from multiple perspectives;
  2. To learn to think across and between disciplines, to apply an interdisciplinary perspective to the complex problems society faces in the twenty-first century;
  3. To integrate their educational experience into a coherent whole;
  4. To articulate the value of their educational experience and understand how that experience informs all aspects of a fully realized ethical, personal, professional, and civic life.

Application Open for the Inaugural 2023-2024 IDEAS Teaching Fellowship

The Institute for the Liberal Arts (ILA) requests applications for the inaugural IDEAS Teaching Fellowship, a year-long graduate student fellowship from September 1, 2023-August 31, 2024.

The awardee will be a current PhD student in a LGS humanities program whose work focuses on the Americas. The fellow will be asked to teach AMST 201: Introduction to American Studies in the spring semester in consultation with the Director of American Studies. In addition, over the course of the academic year, the fellow will be involved with and help facilitate the undergraduate IDEAS (Interdisciplinary Exploration and Scholarship) Fellowship. Duties will include attending and participating in weekly IDEAS lunch meetings (Fridays, 11:30 – 1:00), helping to plan IDEAS events, and serving as a liaison between IDEAS faculty and fellows. We are particularly interested in creative ideas for fostering intellectual community across disciplines and between faculty, graduate students and undergraduate students.

 

Eligibility

Must be in candidacy for the PhD in a LGS humanities program

Application Deadline

May 15, 2023 by 5:00 pm EDT

Award

$12,000 for one academic year. Note: This fellowship can be a top-off for students still on stipend. The time and monies for this fellowship will be in addition to the student’s current stipend and research responsibilities.

To Apply

Submit your application by 5:00 pm EST on Monday, May 15, 2023.

  1. A proposed course description for how you would organize and teach AMST 201 (max 450 words)
  2. A cover letter summarizing qualifications for the fellowship, including year in program and interests (max 250 words)
  3. A current CV
  4. A letter of support from your primary thesis advisor that should be e-mailed to Qiana Woodard at qnwooda@emory.edu with the subject line "IDEAS Teaching Fellowship"