The MCEAS Dissertation Fellowship Program

Nine-Month or One-Semester Fellowships

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MCEAS Barra Dissertation Fellowships are open to candidates from any discipline working on any relevant topic.

The Barra Foundation Fellowship is designed primarily for candidates specializing in Early American art or material culture.

MCEAS Consortium Fellowships are open to candidates from research universities that are members of the McNeil Center Consortium. For more information concerning consortium membership, please contact the Center Director.

Friends of the MCEAS Fellowships are supported by annual donors to the McNeil Center to facilitate dissertation research dealing with the Philadelphia or the Mid-Atlantic region before 1850.

The Richard S. Dunn Fellowship, funded by a gift from an anonymous donor in honor of the Center's founding director, acknowledges excellence in Early American Studies.

The E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Fellowship in Early American Religious Studies is open to candidates in any discipline researching any aspect of religion in North America and the Atlantic world before 1850.

Marguerite Bartlett Hamer Fellowships are awarded to advanced doctoral candidates from any relevant program at the University of Pennsylvania and may include some teaching responsibilities.

The Society of the Cincinnati Fellowship, funded by generous contributions from the State Society of the Cincinnati of Pennsylvania, supports research on the era of the American Revolution.

Other Fellowships

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Sawyer Dissertation Fellowships: The McNeil Center for Early American Studies and the University of Pennsylvania have received a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to conduct a year-long John E. Sawyer Seminar on the Comparative Study of Cultures. The theme of the seminar, to be directed by Professor David Kazanjian of Penn’s English Department, will be “Race, Across Time and Space.” The Sawyer Seminar will examine race as a global phenomenon with long and diverse histories. Such an examination requires new methods and frameworks that can account for vast timescales; overlapping ideologies and cultures; multi-directional flows of people, ideas, and practices; and multi-lingual, multi-disciplinary, and often elusive archives. But the very capaciousness of those methods and frameworks threatens to send the subject spinning off into ungrounded realms of theory and unwieldy paradigms. To counter that tendency, the proposed seminar will focus much of its work on the age of Atlantic revolutions, the period from roughly 1750 to 1850 that is often, but increasingly problematically, seen as formative for modern global racial discourses and practices. The Sawyer program will make possible two dissertation fellowships open to a broad interdisciplinary range of young scholars working on the era of Atlantic revolutions, 1750-1850. Sawyer fellows will be appointed to twelve-month terms, commencing 1 July 2013.

Andrew W. Mellon Fellowships in Early American Literature and Material Texts: In collaboration with the Library Company of Philadelphia, two fellows will be appointed for 13-month terms beginning 1 July 2013. These fellowships are open to dissertators in English, American Literature, Comparative Literature, American Studies, History, Art History, or related fields whose work combines in innovative ways the study of texts—novels, poems, plays, newspapers,magazines, scribal publications, genres not traditionally defined as "literary"—with the material circumstances of their production and dissemination. Projects should rely on the extraordinary rare book, print, and ephemera collections of the Library Company. The fellows' terms will begin and end with a summer workshop under the guidance of a senior invited scholar. The 13-month stipend is $29,000.

The Monticello-McNeil Fellowship, co-sponsored by the McNeil Center and the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello, facilitates scholarship on Thomas Jefferson and his times. Holders of this fellowship spend a portion of their fellowship term at the ICJS in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the remainder in Philadelphia. Reasonable travel costs between Philadelphia and Charlottesville and, subject to availability, housing at ICJS are included.