Graduate Fellowships

CALL FOR APPLICATIONS
2008-2009 Academic Year

Application Deadline: Tuesday, March 31, 2009

The Penn Program on Democracy, Citizenship, and Constitutionalism (DCC) will award 3 graduate fellowships during the 2000-2010 academic year to post-prospectus Penn graduate students with dissertation topics in any discipline relevant to any of the program’s three overarching themes, "Democracy, Citizenship, and Constitutionalism." Applications will be judged chiefly on the quality of the project.

The DCC Graduate Fellowship will provide for the graduate student’s tuition and annual stipend during the 2009-2010 academic year, plus a summer stipend for the summer of either 2009 or 2010. Recipients will also be compensated for administrative work done for the Program. Funds are provided through a generous grant from the Mellon Foundation. The recipients are expected to assist in organizing an interdisciplinary DCC Graduate Student Workshop in which graduate students from Penn and surrounding institutions may present pertinent research. They will also be asked to provide administrative support for the DCC Faculty Workshop Series and Annual Conference and they will be eligible to participate in these events.

After January 1, 2009, applicants should send a description of their dissertation’s aim, current status, and further research plans, not to exceed five double-spaced pages, along with a CV, a copy of their transcript and a letter of endorsement from their Dissertation Supervisor, to:

Professor Rogers M. Smith
Chair, Penn Program on Democracy, Citizenship, and Constitutionalism
Stiteler Hall
208 S. 37th Street
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6215

Questions concerning the DCC Graduate Fellowships should be directed to Professor Smith at:
rogerss@sas.upenn.edu
Phone 215 898-7662

The DCC Program Graduate Fellows for 2007-2008 and their dissertation topics:

Stefan Heumann, Department of Political Science

      "The Tutelary Empire: State- and Nation-Building in the 19th Century United States"

Heumann studied at the Free University of Berlin, the Universite´ de Provence in Aix-en-Provence, France, and was a Berlin Fellow at the Department of Political Science of the University of Pennsylvania before entering the Ph.D. program.  His dissertation project explores the governance of dependent populations in American political development, including territorial settler populations, post-Civil War Confederates, Native, African Americans, and residents of the Philippines under American colonial governance.  These imperial projects all shaped American state- and nation-building in the 19th century. 

Ben Mercer, Department of History

      "Democracy and the 1968 Student Movements in France, Italy, and Germany"

Mercer graduated in 1999 with first class honours in History and English Literature from the University of Western Australia. After a Masters Thesis examining the politics and theory of memory in post-Second World War Europe, he began work on his doctoral dissertation at the University of Pennsylvania. A comparative analysis of the student movements and revolts in France, Germany and Italy in the late 1960s, the dissertation explores the limits and possibilities of democratic politics in the late 20th century. The relevance of the project is perhaps all the more evident given French President Nicolas Sarkozy's desire to "liquidate once and for all" the heritage of 1968.

Mark Navin, Department of Philosophy

      "Toward a Just Global Economy: International Institutional Justice"

Navin's dissertation addresses the justice of the global  economy.  In this work, he defends a liberal contractarian account of institutional justice attuned to the different forms of cooperative behavior present in international society.  These include interactions among sovereign nations and between persons, nations, and institutions of global society (e.g., the WTO, IMF, and the World Bank).  He argues that international and global institutional forms of cooperation are normatively distinct, requiring different regulative principles.  A just world economy requires principles of international justice that prioritize national autonomy and principles of global institutional justice that prioritize democratic participation in global governance.  Egalitarian distributive justice - of the sort familiar from domestic political theory - is unnecessary for transnational economic justice.