HFG Emerging Scholars

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The Harry Frank Guggenheim Emerging Scholar Awards (formerly the Harry Frank Guggenheim Dissertation Fellowships) recognize promising researchers in their final year of writing a doctoral dissertation examining a salient aspect of violence.

Applications open Nov. 1, 2024 - Feb. 1, 2025

The Foundation welcomes proposals from any of the natural and social sciences or allied disciplines that promise to increase understanding of the causes, manifestations, and control of violence and aggression. Highest priority is given to research that addresses urgent, present-day problems of violence—what produces it, how it operates, and what prevents or reduces it.

The Foundation is interested in violence related to many subjects, including, but not limited to, the following:

• War
• Crime
• Terrorism
• Family and intimate-partner relationships
• Climate instability and natural resource competition
• Racial, ethnic, and religious conflict
• Political extremism and nationalism

The Foundation supports research that investigates the basic mechanisms in the production of violence, but primacy is given to proposals that make a compelling case for the relevance of potential findings for policies intended to reduce these ills. Likewise, historical research is considered to the extent that it is relevant to a current situation of violence. Examinations of the effects of violence are welcome insofar as a strong case is made that these outcomes serve, in turn, as causes of future violence. 

The Emerging Scholar Awards 

The award is $25,000 for one year and contributes to the support of a doctoral candidate to enable the completion of a dissertation that advances the Foundation’s research interests described above in a timely manner. They are available only to students for support during the final year of Ph.D. studies.

The award does not support doctoral research. Applicants may be citizens of any country and studying at colleges or universities in any country. 

Timing

Applications for the awards open annually on November 1 and must be received by February 1 the following year for a decision in June. Final decisions are made by the HFG Board of Directors at its meeting in June 2024. Applicants will be informed promptly by email of the Board’s decision. Awards ordinarily commence on September 1, but other starting dates (after July 1) may be requested if the nature of the project deems this appropriate.

Eligibility

Applicants for an award must be Ph.D. candidates entering the dissertation stage of graduate study. Usually, this means that fieldwork or other research is complete and writing has begun or will at the beginning of the award period. If analysis and writing are not far enough along for an applicant to be confident that the dissertation will be completed within the award year, an application should not be submitted. In some disciplines, particularly experimental fields, research and writing can reasonably be expected to be completed within the same year, and in those cases, it is appropriate to apply.

Application

Candidates for the Harry Frank Guggenheim Emerging Scholar Awards may apply online annually between November 1 and February 1. Applicants must create an account to access the application and guidelines. The guidelines are also available through the second link below.

Online Application (Login required)

Application Guidelines (PDF)

Advice for Applicants (PDF)

Recent Recipients

2024

Karime Parodi Ambel (University of California, Los Angeles). Gendering Justice in the Chilean Legal System: Institutional Developments, Legal Actors’ Practices, and Women’s Access to Justice
Kate Birkbeck (Yale University). The Security of a Free State: Public Arms, Private Armies, and the Birth of the American Century, 1865-1915
Moritz Emanuel Bondeli (Yale University). Disturbing the Peace: Mass Politics and Political Violence in Weimar Germany
Madison Dalton (Stanford University). The Politics of Justice: Sexual Violence Case Prosecution in the United States
Ian Glazman-Schillinger (Syracuse University). White Power Goes Online: The History of Digital Hate Networks and the Federal Government’s Response, 1984-1999
Marko Kljajic (University of Wisconsin-Madison). The Challenge of Collective Victimhood and the Promise of Mutual Acknowledgement After Conflict
Zora Piskacova (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill). Torn Men in Torn Towns: Municipal Administrators between the Local and the National in Cieszyn and Český Těšín, 1918-38
Andrew Roskos-Ewoldsen (University of California, Davis). Do Unto Others: Exploring the Role of Reciprocity in International Cooperation and Conflict
Madeleine Stevens (University of Chicago). Weaponizing Uncertainty: The Politics of Disappearance in Argentina, Colombia, and Mexico
Sophie Wunderlich (University of Michigan). American Fascism and its Afterlives: The American Far Right and Paramilitarism in a Global Perspective, 1930-1965
Eddy Yeung (Emory University). Propaganda as Provocation: How Autocrats Use Political Rhetoric to Impede Democratic Uprisings

See Full List