Funding
Fellowships and Awards
The goal of this resource page is to give viewers a brief introduction to some of the fellowships and awards available to them. At present, the page includes several excerpts of fellowship descriptions listed in the current UW-English BOX resource folder.
Department members can find more information on these fellowships, including up-to-date application information, in the UW-English Department BOX folder, “Fellowships and Awards.” (Access requires a current NetID login.)
This English Department Resource Guide is an in-progress, crowdsourced project that will benefit from additional contributions. Which other fellowships and awards–including sub-discipline-specific awards–should be included on this page?
- Ideally, the descriptions and hyperlinks included on this page should be broad enough to persist beyond individual calendar years without frequent editing. Thus, if a fellowship has a different theme each year, please omit the specific theme in favor of describing the fellowship’s general purpose.
Feel free to suggest additional conferences in our shared Google document embedded at the bottom of this page or commenting in the public Hypothes.is annotation layer on the right side of the screen.
UW-Madison Fellowships
Mellon Public Humanities Graduate Fellowships
Our fellowship provides graduate students in the humanities with professional experience outside of academia. By placing fellows in partner organizations around Madison including museums, hospitals, non-profits, community centers, and emerging businesses, the program facilitates the reciprocal sharing of resources and expertise and highlights the significance of the humanities both on and off campus. We aim not only to provide graduate students the opportunity to explore diverse career paths, but also to cultivate a practice of public humanities within their academic work.
The Mellon-Wisconsin Fellowship
The Graduate School has a fellowship competition each semester through the Mellon Foundation that is called the Mellon-Wisconsin Fellowship. This is a separate application than the department one, administered directly from the grad school, and is different from the batch of Mellon fellowships the department can hand out. In addition to visiting the Graduate School’s fellowship website for information, grad students should look out for a listserv email about it each semester.
The Joyce M. Melville Memorial Award for Best Scholarly Project in Composition and Rhetoric
Madeleine Doran Dissertation Fellowship in English.
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- Nominations are typically due to the IRH on March 1st in years in which competition is held, but the department holds its own internal deadline for nominees. Please contact the English department for more information.
Summer Institute Fellowships
The Cornell Institute of Criticism and Theory
The School of Criticism and Theory was founded in 1976 by a group of leading literary scholars in the conviction that an understanding of theory is fundamental to humanistic studies. Today, in a summer campus experience, the SCT offers faculty members and advanced graduate students in the humanities and social sciences a chance to work with preeminent figures in critical thought — exploring debates in and across literary studies, political theory, history, philosophy, art, and anthropology; examining the role of ideological and cultural movements; and reassessing theoretical approaches that have emerged over the last fifty years. Cornell also offers participants the resources of one of the great research libraries in the United States.
The Futures of American Studies Summer Institute (Dartmouth)
This week-long summer institute is divided into plenary sessions that feature talks from Institute faculty and research seminars in which all participants present and discuss their own work-in-progress. Each day of the institute begins with a morning session in which plenary speakers deliver presentations of no longer than thirty-minutes that contribute to our convoking topic. These presentations are followed by questions from the participants. After a lunch break, the Institute’s participants meet in intensive workshop groups (consisting of no more than 15 participants), each of which is led by a Co-Director of the Institute. These workshops offer those enrolled in the Institute—over one hundred scholars from a variety of disciplines and institutions—the opportunity for critical conversations about the central intellectual issues in their research.
The Institute was designed to provide a shared space of critical inquiry that brings the participants’ work-in-progress to the attention of a network of influential scholars. Over the past twenty years, plenary speakers have recommended participants’ work to the leading journals and university presses within the field of American Studies, and have provided participants with recommendations and support in an increasingly competitive job market.
The Institute for World Literature
The Institute for World Literature (IWL) has been created to explore the study of literature in a globalizing world. As we enter the twenty-first century, our understanding of “world literature” has expanded beyond the classic canon of European masterpieces and entered a far-reaching inquiry into the variety of the world’s literary cultures and their distinctive reflections and refractions of the political, economic, and religious forces sweeping the globe. Past guest lecturers and keynote speakers include Gayatri Spivak (2011), Orhan Pamuk (2012), Homi Bhabha (2013 and 2016), Gisèle Sapiro (2014), and Jérôme David (2015). Our seminars are taught by a wide range of scholars working across disciplines. Past seminar leaders include Susan Bassnett, Franco Moretti, Bruce Robbins, Gisèle Sapiro, Lawrence Venuti, Rebecca Walkowitz, and many more.
Dissertation Fellowships
Vollrath Distinguished Graduate Fellowship
Teaching and Pedagogy-Related Fellowships
International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (ISSOTL)
Grads across all the English Department programs can participate in scholarship of teaching and learning. The International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (ISSOTL) is a particularly wonderful organization for grads to participate in because it’s explicitly part of the organization’s mission to involve students (undergrad and grad) as co-inquirers in research and publication and as representatives in organization governance and conference planning. There are grant and award opportunities for student presenters at the ISSOTL annual conference.
Discipline-Specific Fellowships and Awards (forthcoming)
