This list features prominent fellowships in the social sciences. Information on fellowships in the humanities is available at UT’s Humanities Initiative. In many cases, UT will provide supplementary funding to assist with housing and subsidize salaries during a residential fellowship. More information on financial support is available at the Provost’s website.
John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation
Often characterized as “midcareer” awards, Guggenheim Fellowships are intended for those who have already demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts. The purpose of the Guggenheim Fellowship program is to provide Fellows with blocks of time in which they can work with as much creative freedom as possible.
Deadline: Sept. 15
Examples of funded projects:
- The history of American vagrancy laws from the 1950s through the 1970s
- The history and political economy of rivers of the U.S. South
- How Ghanaians make sense of and deal with disability oppression
Advancing the Humanities
ACLS offers fellowships and grants in more than a dozen programs for research in the humanities and related social sciences at the doctoral and postdoctoral levels.
Deadlines: September and November
The Russell Sage Foundation Visiting Scholar Program
The residence program brings together scholars to pursue research and writing projects that reflect the Foundation’s commitment to strengthening the social sciences and applying research more effectively to important social problems. The Foundation particularly welcomes groups of scholars who wish to collaborate on a specific project during their residence at Russell Sage. While Visiting Scholars typically work on projects related to the Foundation’s current programs (Future of Work, Cultural Contact, Immigration, Social Inequality, and Behavioral Economics), a number of scholars whose research falls outside the Foundation’s active programs also participate.
Deadline: Sept. 30
Examples of funded projects:
- The impact of major political campaigns on immigrant political activity
- How President Johnson was able to achieve the Great Society legislation
- The impact of Latino migration on southern cities
Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
The Center awards approximately 20-25 residential fellowships annually to individuals with outstanding project proposals in a broad range of the social sciences and humanities on national and/or international issues. Topics and scholarship should relate to key public policy challenges or provide the historical and/or cultural framework to illuminate policy issues of contemporary importance.
Deadline: Oct. 1
Examples of funded projects:
- Institutions on the Edge: Inter-Branch Crises in Latin America
- The Sino-Russian National Identity Challenge to the World Order
- Governance of the Information Age
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study
The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University is a scholarly community where individuals pursue advanced work across a wide range of academic disciplines, professions and creative arts. Within this broad purpose, the Institute sustains a continuing commitment to the study of women, gender and society but a focus on gender is not a requirement. The Fellowship program has opportunities for individuals and collaborative groups of scholars.
Deadline: October 3 for individual applications; May 6 for fellowship cluster applications
Examples of funded projects:
- Nationality, Religion, and Church-State Symphony: An Ethnographic Study of Secularisms in Southeastern Europe
- Sex Differences in Aggression
- The Acquisition of Spatial Language in American Sign Language: Understanding the Ties to Cognitive Development
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
The purpose of the Visiting Scholars Program is to support the work of postdocs and tenure-track public policy analysts, humanists, and social scientists who show promise of becoming leaders in their field, especially those who work on multidisciplinary topics. The Academy seeks proposals that relate to its primary research areas: humanities and culture, social policy and American institutions, science and global security, and education. Projects that address American cultural, scientific, social or public policy issues from the founding period to the present are welcome. Funding is typically awarded for writing up the results of already completed research.
Deadline: Oct. 15
Examples of funded projects:
- Valuing Property: Eminent Domain for Private Redevelopment, Philadelphia 1992-2007
- Against the Technostructure: Critics of Scientism since the New Deal Propheteering: A Cultural History of Prediction in the Gilded Age
National Humanities Center
In addition to scholars from all fields of the humanities, the Center accepts individuals from the natural and social sciences, the arts, the professions, and public life who are engaged in humanistic projects. Most of the Center’s fellowships are unrestricted. Several, however, are designated for particular areas of research that change annually. These include one fellowship for a young woman in philosophy and fellowships for Scandinavian studies, environmental studies, English literature, art history, Asian Studies, and theology.
Deadline: October 15
Examples of funded projects:
- Arts and Owners: Intellectual Property, Cultural Heritage, and Indonesian Arts
- Landlords and Peasants in Peru: The Socio-Economic Organization of Haciendas
- Caste and the Colonial City: Dalit Life and Labor in Colonial Bombay
Jennings Randolph Senior Fellowship Program
The program provides scholars, policy analysts, policy makers, journalists, and other experts with time in residence to reflect and write on pressing international peace and security challenges.
Deadline: Oct. 17
Institute for Advanced Study/ School of Social Science
Each year, the School of Social Science invites about 20 visiting scholars with various perspectives to examine historical and contemporary problems. In an attempt to create a sense of community, the School designates a theme for each year. For 2012-2013 the theme will be Economics and Politics. Each year, about one-third of the scholars will pursue work relating to the theme, which conducts its own, more focused, seminar. Applications are strongly encouraged from scholars across the social science spectrum, however, regardless of whether their research corresponds to the year’s theme.
Deadline: November 1
Examples of funded projects:
- Reconfiguring France: Muslim Citizens in the Shadows of Secularism
- A More Perfect Union: Economic Inequality, Democratic Responsiveness, and Electoral Institutions
- Islamic Theories of Justice
National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship
The National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship Program supports early career scholars working in critical areas of education research. This nonresidential postdoctoral fellowship funds proposals that make significant scholarly contributions to the field of education. The program also develops the careers of its recipients through professional development activities involving National Academy of Education members.
Deadline: November 4
Examples of funded projects:
- Civic Education and the Limits of Autonomy
- The Impact of School Policy on Residential Segregation
- School, Society, and State: A New Education to Govern Modern America, 1890-1940
Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Residency Program
The Foundation is particularly interested in applicants whose work connects in some way with the Rockefeller Foundation’s areas of focus: Basic Survival Safeguards, Global Health, Climate and Environment, Urbanization, and Social and Economic Security. The Center also offers collaborative residencies for two to four people working on the same project.
Deadline: Dec. 1
Pembroke Center at Brown University Postdoctoral Fellowship
The Pembroke Center annually supports three or four postdoctoral research fellows in residence for an academic year. Candidates who do work that is qualitative and humanistic in nature are drawn from the humanities, the social sciences, and the life sciences. The research focus for the 2012-2013 Seminar is “Economies of Perception.”
Deadline: December 8
Funded projects for 2011-2012 theme, “The Question of Consent”:
- “Gifting” Consent in AIDS Research in Malawi
- Sex and Harm in the Age of Consent
- Is the Nation a Grave?: Female Revolutionary Violence and the Politics of Martyrdom
Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University
CASBS offers residential individual fellowships for recently tenured scholars from a diverse range of disciplines, including anthropology, economics, political science, psychology and sociology as well as scholars from a wide range of humanistic disciplines, education, linguistics and the biological sciences. The focus of the Center is to extend knowledge of the principles governing human behavior to help solve the critical problems of contemporary society.
The Center also offers Fellowships for group projects, which should consist of 3 – 5 scholars with a well-defined goal who are dedicated to solving an important problem in the behavioral sciences.
Deadline: March 1
Examples of funded projects:
- The Cultural Defense Plea
- Health and Aging
- The Wartime president
Fulbright Scholar Program
Deadline: August 1
The core Fulbright Scholar Program sends 800 U.S. faculty and professionals abroad each year. Grantees lecture and conduct research in a wide variety of academic and professional fields.