For the first time, the University will offer three postdoctoral fellowships in the humanities and humanistic sciences for recent Ph.D. graduates during the coming academic year.

The two-year fellowships come as part of efforts to build a larger postdoctoral community in the humanities at the University. They are open to students who completed doctoral programs at Yale between May 2011 and May 2012, and each Yale graduate program may nominate up to one of its graduates for a position, Yale College Dean Mary Miller said in an email to directors of graduate studies last week.

The postdoctoral positions will allow recent graduates “to broaden their intellectual reach beyond the confines of their discipline, both to expand their intellectual formation and to improve their chances for success on the job market,” Miller wrote.

These postdoctoral fellows will each teach three courses per year, one of which must be for freshmen — a section of Directed Studies, for instance, or an introductory English class. One class must be team-taught with a faculty member outside the fellow’s discipline. The postdoctoral fellows will also participate in an existing working group of humanities postdocs at Yale, Miller wrote.

Graduate programs have until April 27 to nominate candidates for the fellowships.