Research into 18th-century Fellowships

I simply Googled “Frances Burney fellowship” and am excited to report on the McGill-ASECS Fellowship, sponsored by the Burney Society (North America), the Burney Society (UK) and the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS). It awards $3,000 CAN for one month of research at the McGill University Library’s Burney Centre Rare Books and Special Collection Division in Montreal, CA. The latest deadline was 31 December 2019; I am marking my calendar for this one. The Burney Centre consolidates archival material on the Burney family from the major Burney Collections at the New York Public Library (Berg Collection), the British Library, Yale’s Beinecke Library, Harvard’s Houghton Library, and The Huntington in San Marino, CA. At the library I would have access to related online resources Literature Online, 600-1903 (LION) and the Burney Collection of 17th and 18th Century Newspapers, which I discovered for my research last week. (I found out that if I go to U-M I can access it there, too). Applicants send a CV and 1,200-1,500 word project description, and must be a member of ASECS. Fellowship reports by previous fellowship holders are available on the website to assist in the application drafting process. I should look up (later) fellowships for the other libraries that the Burney Centre pulls from, too. 

In addition, the Burney Centre awards the Hemlow Prize in Burney Studies to the “best essay written by a graduate student on any aspect of the life or writings of Frances Burney or members of the Burney Family” to include a $250 award, a year’s membership and publication. The Burney Society hosts the biannual Burney Society North America Conference, organizes the Behn Burney Conference, and publishes the definitive scholarly editions of Burney’s letters and the memoirs of her father, Charles Burney, which she edited (both freely available on the Centre’s website), and the Burney Society’s journal and newsletter. Slight tangent: they are associated with one of the most beautiful DH sites I have seen to date, and that is readingwithausten.com. 

Many thanks to Emily for providing us the listing of fellowships, which included the American Trust for the British Library (ATBL) and Harvard University’s Houghton Library Fellowship, which would allow one to travel to the British Library and the Houghton Library for four weeks with a $5,000 stipend. The deadline is 28 February 2020. 

The following three fellowships were mentioned to me as relevant for eighteenth-century scholarship at the South Central Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (SCSECS) conference that I attended over the weekend: The Huntington, the Clark, and the Folger. The Huntington Library Fellowship accepts applications 30 August 2019 through 15 November 2019, and awards stipends of $3,500 per month for 1-5 months. I could apply for a long-term (year-long) fellowship once I have completed all requirements for the PhD, and could apply for a short-term fellowship (of five months or less) once I am ABD. The William Andrews Clark Memorial Library Fellowship (sponsored by the Center for 17th- & 18th-Century Studies) supports graduate student research at the Clark at UCLA through five fellowships, with applications due 1 February annually: an ASECS/Clark Fellowship for ABD graduate students with projects in the Restoration or the eighteenth-century ($3,000 for 1 month); the Kanner Fellowship in British Studies ($9,000 for 3 months) supports predoctoral and postdoctoral scholars “in any area pertaining to British history and culture”; the Kenneth Karmiole Endowed Graduate Research Fellowship ($4,000 for 1 month of residency) applies to all graduate students using archival and printed materials on any subject at the Clark Library. The Clark Summer Institute, an interdisciplinary research group at the Clark, “is encouraged but not a requirement for a fellowship” and is intended to support fellows in residency. The Clark library comprises books and manuscripts from England and France between 1650 and 1830 (its online search splits the holdings pre- and post-1715). The Folger Institute Research Fellowship supports scholarship outside the Folger Library even when the Folger is under construction; the deadline was 1 January 2020, for a $3,500 stipend for 4 weeks.