Job Description

NUS College (NUSC), the honours program for the National University of Singapore, plans to hire dedicated individuals to fill numerous vacancies. These are full-time, renewable lecturer positions that include opportunities for research funding and for promotion to Associate Professor with Open Contract on the NUS Educator Track, as described below.

The primary responsibility is to offer one of our mandatory courses, to which you will be expected to bring your own academic and intellectual expertise. The courses and corresponding positions are:

Understanding the Social World: Singapore and Beyond (USW)

This course introduces students to the social world and explores how social scientists approach the study of social norms, relations, and institutions as experienced by different groups and how they interact and intersect, influencing each other both in Singapore and beyond. Applicants from any field representing the Social Sciences are welcome to apply for this position. We especially encourage sociologists, political scientists, and interdisciplinary social science scholars to apply. We are interested in candidates whose work is comparative and can be applied to better understand the Singaporean context. The selected candidate’s primary responsibility will be to co-design and teach the course together with other course instructors to ensure that students have a common curricular experience while allowing for individual instructor creativity in their seminars. Applicants should demonstrate their ability to design and teach such a course by providing evidence of teaching interdisciplinary courses in the social sciences or by reflecting on how they would help design and participate in a common course that helps students understand the complex social forces that surround them and explores how they evolve and interact both intentionally and unintentionally in the context of Singapore and beyond. Successful candidates are expected to offer 3 sections of Understanding the Social World: Singapore and Beyond in the academic year, an elective of their own design, and take on a small supervision load of independent study modules.

Global Social Thought (GST)

This module explores perspectives on power and society by engaging with influential currents in social thought and their relationships to contemporary global concerns. Students will examine the ways in which these ideas have been taken up in contemporary social analysis and political practice in different parts of the world over time. While applicants from any field of study are welcome to apply for this position, individuals with backgrounds in the humanities and humanistic social sciences from such fields as history, sociology, anthropology, and political theory are encouraged to apply. We are especially interested in candidates whose work engages with modern social theories from Western and non-Western traditions, demonstrating how they enable critical analyses and understandings of social, cultural, and political practices in global and local contexts. The course covers foundational social thought and postcolonial and feminist critiques addressing themes including modernization, globalization, colonialism, and multiculturalism. Candidates should demonstrate the ability to teach the work of such thinkers as Ibn Khaldun, Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, Mary Wollstonecraft, Simone de Beauvoir, Frantz Fanon, Fei Xiaotong, Michel Foucault, Edward Said, Ashis Nandy, Syed Hussein Alatas, and Saba Mahmood, among others. Successful candidates are expected to offer 3 sections of Global Social Thought in the academic year, an elective of their own design, and take on small supervision load of independent study modules.

Apart from offering sections for one of the above courses, a secondary responsibility is to contribute to other parts of NUSC education and more broadly to new developments in interdisciplinary honours education in NUS. This role could include designing and teaching more specialised, knowledge-based elective classes that are interdisciplinary in nature and draw on your own interests and expertise. Another option is for you to offer original ideas about what other kinds of contributions you can bring to interdisciplinary education in NUS in small class settings. Generally, all NUSC classes maintain small faculty-to-student ratios. No matter what secondary role you see yourself performing, you should have a commitment to innovation in undergraduate and honours education, be devoted to your own research and teaching excellence, and have the willingness and ability to engage students from diverse disciplinary backgrounds.

Qualifications

Candidates must hold a PhD by August 2022. While we are keen to hire individuals able to start by that time, we will also consider individuals able to start by January 2023. Remuneration and benefits are highly competitive on the global research university level. Benefits include relocation assistance and a housing subsidy for the first nine years. Appointments begin at the level of Lecturer on the Educator Track, or possibly the level of Senior Lecturer if previous experience warrants it. Although the NUS Educator Track is not a tenurable line, it offers a pathway to promotion to Associate Professorship on an open contract (and beyond), as well as opportunities for research funding, including overseas research and conference travel. The contract is for three years in the first instance and is renewable subject to good performance.

Interested applicants should prepare and submit the following documents when they apply:

• A cover letter, clearly specifying which position they are applying for.
• CV: An abridged CV (5-page maximum), including details on education, employment history, past experience of teaching and supervision, research activities (including publications) and achievements, honours and awards, and service accomplishments.
• Qualifications: Include scanned copies of academic degrees.
• Teaching Portfolio:
  • A Teaching Statement that commences with a preface (maximum 300 words) that makes the case for appointment. This should be a highly distilled summary of key contributions to student learning and, if applicable, educational leadership, guided by your teaching philosophy. The rest of the Statement, of not more than 2,000 words, should outline your teaching philosophy and your educational contribution across multiple dimensions and roles. Please include evidence on how you have impact students’ learning experience and outcomes as well as how you have influenced peers and the community.
  • Teaching evaluations and peer review reports, if available. Other evidence of teaching excellence and/or other contributions to education, e.g., curriculum development, pedagogical innovation etc., should also be provided.

• A proposal, of not more than 500 words, describing a prospective syllabus for the target course.
• A statement, of not more than 500 words, highlighting how you plan to contribute to pedagogical innovation and/or advance interdisciplinary honours education at NUSC.
• FOUR referees’ letters (one of whom must be the applicant’s PhD supervisor). Referees may submit their letters to uspbox23@nus.edu.sg.

Applications will be considered on a rolling basis beginning from mid-Apr 2022.

Interviews will normally be conducted online. Only shortlisted applicants will be notified. We plan to conduct the process entirely online given the uncertain travel situation.