Grants and Fellowships for Scholars in the Humanities 

Learn how to make your fellowship and grant proposals competitive to a wide range of selection committees. We’ll discuss what does and does not need to be in a research proposal, the proper tone and form, and ways to tease out the larger stakes of individual research projects and avoid the jargon of field-specific descriptions. This session will help you craft a research proposal that appeals to a broad academic audience. This workshop will be an opportunity for graduate students to learn about The Humanities Institute’s funding resources as well as strategies for acquiring extramural support.

The workshop will be led by Pranav Anand (Faculty Director at The Humanities Institute and Professor of Linguistics) and Caitlin Charos (Research Development Specialist, Humanities and Humanistic Social Sciences). Clara Bergamini (PhD candidate in History) will discuss her role as Research Development GSR and how to set up a meeting to discuss funding opportunities. As part of the workshop, Saskia Nauenberg Dunkell (Research Programs and Communications Manager at The Humanities Institute) will also share an overview of THI resources to support graduate students with fellowship applications.

Pranav Anand, professor of the Linguistics Department at UC Santa Cruz, is THI’s new Faculty Director. Anand was awarded the John Dizikes Teaching Award in Humanities, and earlier this year served as co-principal investigator on a National Endowment for the Humanities grant to create a certificate program for engineering students to better understand the impact of technology on the world.

Caitlin Charos grew up in Stockton, California and earned degrees from University of Pennsylvania (B.A., English), University of York, U.K. (M.A., Cultures of Empire, Resistance, and Postcoloniality), and Princeton University (M.A., A.B.D., English). While pursuing a Ph.D. in English at Princeton University, Caitlin established herself as a researcher, teacher, and persuasive grant writer, and was awarded a fellowship funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for scholarship on global migration. Her research interests include postcolonial literatures, particularly literatures from southern Africa, gender and sexualities, race and ethnicity, and the novel. Caitlin began her career in research development as a fellow in Princeton’s Office of Corporate Engagement and Foundation Relations, where she helped connect faculty members to foundation funders with shared missions. She has supported faculty in securing significant grants from the The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, University of California Humanities Research Institute, and University of California Office of the President. She is a member of the National Organization of Research Development Professionals. Caitlin loves talking with faculty about their research and is dedicated to applying her experience in support of humanities and social sciences research at UCSC.

Saskia Nauenberg Dunkell is the Research Programs and Communications Manager at The Humanities Institute (THI). In her role, she manages research projects, graduate and undergraduate student programs, communications, and public humanities initiatives at the institute. She holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and is a Research Advisor for the UCSC Human Rights Investigations Lab for the Americas. Before moving to UCSC, she was an inaugural research affiliate at the Promise Institute for Human Rights at UCLA School of Law and yearlong National Science Foundation fellow at the Center for Conflict, Displacement, and Peacebuilding at the University of Cartagena, Colombia. Alongside her scholarship, she has directed Global Youth Connect’s Colombia Human Rights Delegation, worked at the International Peace and Security Institute’s The Hague Symposium on Post-Conflict Transitions and International Justice, and served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Kingdom of Tonga.

Clara Bergamini is a PhD candidate in history and Research development GSR at UC Santa Cruz. She is working on a dissertation tentatively titled “Mapping Imperial Japan’s Greatest Calamities: Learning Nation and Enacting Empire Through Disaster.” My research centers around how people’s experiences with and memories of crises and catastrophes shape society over time through moments of memory-making. Specifically, my research focuses on how the annual anniversaries of the 1923 Great Kantō Disaster and other disasters were used for various political and social programming during Japan’s imperial period.

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About the PhD+ Workshop Series