Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Fellowship resources

With deadlines coming up for fellowship applications, here are some places to look for funding sources for legal historians.
  • Legal history blog posts announcing fellowships are here and here, or click on the "fellowship" labels on the sidebar (then scroll down, and click "older posts" at the bottom for more). We don't post about every fellowship every year, so scan through older posts for relevant funding sources.
  • Announcements for many fellowships from H-Net are here.
A few of words of advice:
  • if you apply for one fellowship, apply for as many others as you can find that might be relevant to your work. For both you and your recommenders, the hard work is writing the first one. The others may require some tweaking, but once the proposals (and letters of recommendation) are written, the subsequent ones are much easier to do.
  • everyone applies for the big national fellowships (e.g. Guggenheim and ACLS). You should apply as well, but you increase your chances of success if you find less well-known funding sources that are targeted directly to your research. (A good example is the Scholar's Award from the Truman Library Institute, which funds work on the Truman era that involves using the Truman Library archives. Great for Cold War-era legal and political history. This fellowship helped fund my work many years ago on Cold War Civil Rights.
  • If you are a law professor applying for fellowships, advice for you is here. A prior LHB round-up of fellowship advice is here.