HUMANITIES RELEASE TIME NEW ELIGIBILITY GUIDELINES
CAMPUS RESEARCH BOARD
OFFICE OF THE VICE CHANCELLOR FOR RESEARCH
Submission Deadline Date:  January 10, 2012 by 3:00 p.m.

Humanities Release Time (HRT) is open to tenure-stream full-time faculty members in any discipline/department with at least a 2:1 teaching load (i.e., three courses a year) (Effective December 16, 2011). Applications from the units listed below -- which represent longstanding humanities units on our campus -- are particularly welcome. All applicants must make clear the humanistic focus and contributions of their work. It is appreciated, however that humanistic endeavors are broad and various. In this regard, applicants might find the following statement from the 1965 National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act helpful (of course, humanities research at the University of Illinois is not bound by the confines of '[our] national life'):

The term 'humanities' includes, but is not limited to, the study of the following: language, both modern and classical; linguistics; literature; history; jurisprudence; philosophy; archaeology; comparative religion; ethics; the history, criticism and theory of the arts; those aspects of social sciences which have humanistic content and employ humanistic methods; and the study and application of the humanities to the human environment with particular attention to reflecting our diverse heritage, traditions, conditions of national life.

HRT applications must be accompanied by a letter of support from the departmental executive officer. The letter must indicate two things: (1) That the department is willing to exempt faculty members from a semester of teaching in the subsequent AY (they will be compensated $12,000 for releasing the faculty member); and (2) That the faculty member would otherwise not have access to this sort of semester-long release time from teaching.  The letter can be uploaded on the application in the supplemental documentation section or a pdf of the letter can be emailed to kdfrazie@illinois.edu or the original can be mailed to Kelley Frazier, 404 Swanlund Administration Building, MC 304.

HRT applications can no longer be accompanied by additional funding requests to the Research Board.  The applicant will receive $2,000 for unrestricted expenses associated with the project and within the normal Research Board guidelines.  Applicants are welcome, however, to submit requests for research related to the release time at later Research Board deadlines.

African Studies
African American Studies
American Indian Studies
Anthropology
Asian American Studies
Art History
Architectural & Landscape History
Unit for Cinema Studies
Classics
Program in Comparative Literature
Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory
Division of English as an International Language
English
East Asian Languages and Cultures
French
Gender and Women's Studies
Germanic Languages and Literatures
History
Language Learning Laboratory
Linguistics
Latin American Studies
Latina/Latino Studies
Medieval Studies
Musicology
Philosophy
Program for the Study of Religion
Russian, East European, & Eurasia Studies
Slavic Languages and Literatures
South Asian & Middle Eastern Studies
Spanish, Italian and Portuguese
Speech Communication
Theatre History