USC Annenberg announced this week that applications are now being accepted for the Knight Luce Fellowship for Reporting on Global Religion.

The fellowship, sponsored by the Knight Chair in Media and Religion and funded by a grant from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion and International Affairs, offers stipends for American journalists to report and write stories that illuminate how religion crosses geographic, temporal and ideological borders as well as how it establishes real and virtual boundaries.

Applications are due by December 17, 2010. For more information about the Knight Luce Fellowship and to apply, click here.

Staff reporters, affiliated freelancers and self-employed web journalists working in the States or abroad who cover politics, social and cultural issues are encouraged to apply, along with religion specialists and generalists. Successful applicants will be awarded stipends from $5,000 to $25,000 to subsidize travel, living and miscellaneous costs.

“The twenty-first century has seen an unprecedented movement of people across borders as well as the revitalization of experiential spiritual politics and the resurgence of religious politics,” said Diane Winston, Knight Chair in Media and Religion at USC Annenberg.  “However, at the same time, reporters who want to pursue in-depth, investigative pieces told through multi-platform media often lack institutional support for their work. The Knight Luce Fellowship encourages working journalists to consider what these dynamics reveal about personal identity, political power, the nature of conflict and the construction of community and provides them with the means to report and distribute the story.”
 

Within the six-month period of their fellowship, fellows will travel outside the U.S. to report stories that explore how religion, religious institutions, and religious people effect change in on-the-ground social, political and economic conditions. They might examine how ideas and ideologies circulate among home and diaspora communities or how religious and political coexistence and cooperation are promoted or inhibited. These stories will be developed for delivery on multiple platforms – print, radio, TV, online. Finally, at the completion of their projects, several fellows will be invited to spend three days in residence at USC to present their work, hold master classes for journalism students, and give public lectures for the USC community.

Thanks to a previous Luce grant, USC scholars have developed a master’s program in religion and international relations set to commence in 2011; sponsored conferences on religion and international affairs; seeded course development on religion and international relations; and engaged a new crop of doctoral students to study religion and international affairs. The Knight Luce grant will continue along this same trajectory, generating both on-campus discussions that will have curricular and programmatic benefits on campus as well as news reporting that will impact the real world.

The Henry Luce Foundation was established in 1936 by Henry R. Luce, the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Time Inc., to honor his parents who were missionary educators in China. The Foundation builds upon the vision and values of four generations of the Luce family: broadening knowledge and encouraging the highest standards of service and leadership.  The Henry Luce Foundation seeks to bring important ideas to the center of American life, strengthen international understanding, and foster innovation and leadership in academic, policy, religious and art communities. The Luce Foundation pursues its mission today through a variety of grant-making programs; among these is the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion and International Affairs.

The Knight Chair in Media and Religion, established in 2002 by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, participates in a wide range of activities, including the organization of conferences for working journalists and the sponsorship of events for the local community. Dr. Winston addresses a host of issues surrounding religion and media through her writing and public speaking, as well as her development of coursework and symposiums. Through these outreach activities, USC Annenberg has begun to emerge as a hub for re-visioning how the press—and society itself—thinks about and reports on religion.