For many scholars, late summer is a critical time for finalizing materials, requesting letters, and assembling a targeted list of funding opportunities. How do different funding structures (residential, non-residential, short-term, long-term) align with scholarly project stages? How do you develop a compelling, feasible, and well-grounded proposal for competitive fellowships? From figuring out what fellowships are out there, to developing an application timeline, to writing your proposal, this moderated panel provides insight into the fellowship landscape and strategies for securing support.
We’ve compiled some of the opportunities and resources mentioned in the discussion and the chat. We might’ve missed a few, which speaks to what a rich discussion it was! These include:
American Antiquarian Society Fellowships
University of Georgia Fellowships (in particular, the Lucy Hargrett Draper Center and Archives and the John W. Lowe Fellowship)
Smith College Library Fellowships
Cokie Roberts Fellowship at the National Archives Foundation
Maine Women Writers Collection
American Association of University Women
Brown University Pembroke Center
Nan Wolverton is Vice President for Academic and Public Programs at American Antiquarian Society, a national research library of pre-1900 printed and manuscript sources located in Worcester, Massachusetts. She manages and oversees all aspects of the Society’s programming, including its public programs featuring humanities research grounded in the AAS archival collections and its fellowship program which supports the work of approximately fifty scholars annually. Wolverton has taught at Smith College and Amherst College and has served as a material culture and humanities consultant for numerous institutions, including the Emily Dickinson Museum, Herman Melville’s Arrowhead, the Nichols House Museum, Historic Deerfield, Inc., and the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center. She has lectured and published widely on material and visual culture topics ranging from the visual arts as practiced by Paul Revere to the material culture of Indigenous basket makers and sellers in what is now the Northeast United States. She holds a PhD in American Studies from the University of Iowa.
Barbara McCaskill is a Distinguished Research Professor at the University of Georgia. Her books include The Magnificent Reverend Peter Thomas Stanford (UGA Press, 2020) Love, Liberation, and Escaping Slavery: William and Ellen Craft in Cultural Memory (UGA Press, 2015), and Post-Bellum, Pre-Harlem: African American Literature and Culture, 1877-1919 (NYU Press, 2006). She has received grants and fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, the Willson Center for Humanities, the Georgia Humanities Grant, the Rockefeller Foundation Humanities Fellowship, and more. She was the 2025 recipient of the SSAWW Karen Dandurand Lifetime Achievement Award.
Nazera Sadiq Wright is an associate professor of English at the University of Kentucky. Her book, Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century (University of Illinois Press, 2016), won the 2018 Children’s Literature Association’s Honor Book Award for Outstanding Book of Literary Criticism. Her research is supported by the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. During 2017–18, she was in residence at the Library Company of Philadelphia as a National Endowment of the Humanities Fellow and an Andrew W. Mellon Program in African American History Fellow to advance her second book on the influence of libraries on the literary careers of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century African American women writers. She is a Fellow at the National Humanities Center (NHC) for the 2026-27 academic year.