Faculty Hiring Initiatives
The College of Arts and Sciences is excited to announce two faculty hiring constellations intended to bring together tenure-line faculty members whose research, scholarship, and creative activity can help bring new, interdisciplinary perspectives to the areas of Societal Resilience to Climate Change and Envisioning and Narrating Emerging Futures.
We invite inquiries from outstanding teacher-scholars who want to join the University of Tennessee’s world-class faculty and work with colleagues in the College of Arts and Sciences to make life and lives better.
Learn more about each new faculty hiring constellations and searches that are underway for both constellations for the 2024-25 academic year.
Societal Resilience to Climate Change
Climate change has already become, and will remain, a defining global challenge of the 21st century. With societies now experiencing acute effects of rapid climate change, including environmental degradation, changes in global migration patterns, and political conflicts among nation-states, public and expert attention is increasingly shifting towards developing societal capabilities for disaster preparedness, prevention, mitigation, and resilience.
Positions added in the strategic focus area of Societal Resilience to Climate Change will leverage the college’s existing instructional and research strengths in disciplines and transdisciplinary areas that speak to questions of climate change and societal resilience; because of students’ interest in working to combat the most acute effects of global climate change, these disciplines are also ones that experience strong undergraduate and graduate instructional demand.
Strengthening research and instructional capabilities in this focus area helps make life and lives better and connects with existing UT-wide initiatives focusing on human health and wellness and the circular bioeconomy and global energy ecosystems.
Open Faculty Positions for the Societal Resilience to Climate Change Constellation
- Assistant Professor of Biological Anthropology, Department of Anthropology
- Assistant Professor of Energy Transition, Department of Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences
- Assistant Professor of International Relations and Climate, Department of Political Science
- Assistant Professor of Social Psychology, Department of Psychology
Please contact Patrick Grzanka, Divisional Dean for Social Sciences, with any questions.
Envisioning and Narrating Emerging Futures
As Volunteers, our goal is not simply to study the world; we want to change it for the better. It is not enough, for example, to identify structural inequities that lead to health disparities; we also want to inspire people and policymakers to remove those inequities to help make life and lives better, and work with them to make it happen.
One way to put our scholarship and creative activity into practice is to construct trustworthy narratives that help people and policymakers understand how the future can be different from the present. In addition, as the pace of global environmental, social, and technological change increases, strengthening citizens’ ability to craft narratives that both explain these changes and present a vision of alternative futures will be important for inoculating societies against extremism and demagoguery. Finally, it will be important to provide citizens with the ability to recognize and refute narratives that have been designed by others (e.g., bad actors) to promote and elevate conflict and polarization.
Investments in the Envisioning and Narrating Emerging Futures strategic focus area will expand the college’s capabilities in translational research focused on applying scholarly insights to initiatives designed to make life and lives better in Tennessee and across the nation and will help us prepare students to compete for new jobs in employment sectors that do not yet exist. These investments will also help better prepare our students for visual storytelling and content creation jobs that are vital to Tennessee’s growing gaming industry and motion picture industry, which rank among the top five states nationwide in total state-level employment.
Open Faculty Positions for the Envisioning and Narrating Emerging Futures Constellation
- Assistant Professor of Photography, School of Art
- Assistant Professor of Art History – Museum Studies, School of Art
- Assistant Professor of Digital and New Media, Department of English
- Assistant Professor of Public History – Appalachia, Department of History
- Assistant Professor of Religion in Public Life, Department of Religious Studies
- Assistant Professor of Applied Theatre, Department of Theatre
Please contact Beauvais Lyons, Divisional Dean for Arts and Humanities, with any questions.