East European Studies Dissertation Fellowships

The deadline for this competition has passed. The description below is for information purposes only. Award recipients will be announced in the spring.

The American Council of Learned Societies offers support for dissertations in East European studies in all disciplines of the humanities and social sciences. ACLS has secured funding (for one year only) for this competition, which in the past has been supported by the Title VIII Program of the U.S. Department of State. There is no competition for Postdoctoral Fellowships this year.

Fellowship Categories

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

Guidelines

All topics, periods, and approaches in East European studies are welcome.

Applications should be for work on Eastern Europe, defined as: 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 to those of other parts of the world.

Fellowships will be granted based on the potential of the applicant, the quality and scholarly significance of the proposed work, and its importance to the development of the field of East European studies. ACLS selection committees consider language competence essential to research.

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 or grants offered by other funders. However, not more than one ACLS or ACLS-joint award may normally be accepted in any one competition year.

Specification of Research or Writing Fellowships

Applicants must apply for one of these two categories of support. The application essay should state clearly 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.

Eligibility: Applicants

• Applicants must be 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 by June 2013.
• 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.
• Must aim to produce a PhD dissertation, 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)