Dissertation Fellowships in East European Studies

The American Council of Learned Societies offers support for writing dissertations in East European studies in all disciplines of the humanities and the social sciences.

Funding is offered for two types of support:

• Research Fellowships for use in Eastern Europe to conduct fieldwork or archival investigations.
• Writing Fellowships for use in the United States, after all research is complete, to write the dissertation.

Applications should be for work on Eastern Europe: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Kosovo/a, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Montenegro, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, and Slovenia. Applicants may propose comparative work considering more than one country of Eastern Europe or relating East European societies of those of other parts of the world.

Fellowships will be granted on the basis of the scholarly potential of the applicant, the quality and scholarly importance of the proposed work, and its importance to the development of scholarship on Eastern Europe. ACLS selection committees consider language competence essential to research. Therefore, applicants will be asked to describe their command of the language(s) required for their proposed projects.

The stipend will be up to $18,000. As a condition of the award, the applicant's home university will be required (consistent with its policies and regulations) to provide or to waive normal academic year tuition payments or to provide alternative cost-sharing support.

Title VIII/ACLS awards support scholars at key points early in career: acquisition of an East European language as a basic research tool, dissertation research, dissertation writing, postdoctoral work before tenure to turn the dissertation into a book or to embark on the first serious research project after the dissertation, travel to conferences to present results of research in progress, and organization of planning workshops and formal conferences. Applicants are encouraged to consider applying for these funding opportunities in sequence. Accordingly, the record of success in completing work under terms of one Title VIII/ACLS grant or fellowship should be mentioned in the essay of any subsequent application.

Specification of Research or Writing Fellowships

Applicants must apply for one of these two categories of support and in the application essay clearly state how much work on the dissertation has already been accomplished and in what specific ways progress would be advanced by an ACLS award. The selection committee will consider the intrinsic intellectual merit of the project, the workplan proposed, and evidence of progress made toward completion.

Applications for research fellowships should state the questions or hypotheses driving research, the methods to be used for gathering relevant evidence, and preliminary versions of the dissertation’s main argument.

Applications for writing fellowships should state what materials have been collected, how research questions may have been answered or modified, and the direction that analysis will take once writing has begun. ACLS selection committees understand the problem posed by timing – often, applications for writing are written in the midst of fieldwork or archival research, which means that all relevant materials have not yet been collected and the dissertation’s argument may be still inchoate. Applicants should address this problem directly in the application essay, describing as accurately as possible what they have managed to accomplish as of the application deadline and how they envision the dissertation taking shape during the period of the writing fellowship.

An individual may apply to all fellowship and grant programs for which he or she is eligible, such as the Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship. However, not more than one ACLS or ACLS-joint award may normally be accepted in any one competition year.

Eligibility: Applicants 

• Applicants must be U.S. citizens or permanent residents.
• Applicants must be currently enrolled in a Ph.D. program at a university in the United States.
• Applicants must have completed all requirements for the Ph.D. except the dissertation (ABD) by June 2011.
• Applicants may apply for one-year research and writing fellowships in sequence, but may not apply for a second year of funding in either category.

Eligibility: Projects 

• Must pertain to at least one of the East European countries listed above.
• Must be in the humanities or social sciences and must investigate aspects of East European societies, histories, and cultures with a special regard for how they illuminate contemporary issues or the necessary background for understanding such issues. (This excludes projects in the natural sciences, mathematics, archaeology, music theory, pure linguistics, and philosophy. However, proposals in such disciplines as the history or sociology of science, music, etc. and sociolinguistics may be eligible, if they address the impact of a given topic on East European societies.)
• Must aim to produce a written scholarly product, to be written in English.
• Must clearly state a plan of work that can be accomplished during the fellowship period.

Application Requirements

Applications must include the following:

• Completed application form
• Proposal (no more than five pages, double spaced, in Times New Roman 11-point font)
• Up to two additional pages of images, musical scores, or other similar supporting non-text materials [optional]
• Bibliography (no more than two pages)
• Publications list (no more than two pages) [optional]
• Three reference letters
• Institutional statement
• Language evaluation form(s)