External Fellowships

There are many possible sources of funding available to our students, of different amounts and for different purposes. Some offer generous fellowships (the Graduate College has a program to award tuition and fee waivers when such awards are made). Some offer smaller amounts either to support work in the summer, or to travel, or for materials, or for training, or for other purposes. Some are for underrepresented minorities or other groups. Some are for particular thesis topics, that may include certain philosophical projects as well as other disciplines. Some apply at any stage of your education, while others are for ABD students. Yet others are for postdoctoral fellowships (everyone going on the job market should consider these).

The bottom line is that you will need to do some research to find opportunities that might suit you. In the first place you should look at the APA’s list of resources. (Unfortunately, the APA does not have a separate section for the funding of graduate studies: you should search the page for such terms as ‘graduate’, ‘dissertation’ or ‘postdoc’.) If you find some potential sources, you should talk them over with your advisor and the DGS to determine their suitability, and whether you are ready for them.

The advantages to securing – or even applying for – external funding go beyond the material ones. You will gain experience completing an application (including securing letter writers); and you will obtain independent validation of your scholarship.

Other resources

The following are sources of funding that should be of special interest to UIC students:

  • The Graduate College maintains a useful page of internal and external opportunities, and links to current resources.
  • AAUW (American Association of University Women): AAUW has a long and distinguished history of advancing educational and professional opportunities for women in the United States and around the globe.
  • The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation: Through its array of programs, Woodrow Wilson has been privileged to support the development of more than 21,000 leaders—teachers and scholars, leaders and businesspeople, artists and innovators.  See especially the Newcombe Dissertation Fellowship.
  • DAAD (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst): For study (research or language study) in Germany.
  • Ford Foundation: Through its Fellowship Programs, the Ford Foundation seeks to increase the diversity of the nation’s college and university faculties by increasing their ethnic and racial diversity, to maximize the educational benefits of diversity, and to increase the number of professors who can and will use diversity as a resource for enriching the education of all students.
  • Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowships: These support a year of research and writing to help advanced graduate students in the humanities and related social sciences in the last year of PhD dissertation writing.
  • UIC provides access to a variety of grant databases, across the disciplines.
  • The philosophy departments at NYU and Penn State maintain useful pages that focus on some of the biggest sources of funding.
  • An interesting new development are ‘cotutelle’ programs, for instance at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, or at a German university through the DAAD program. These provide fellowships to study abroad during the writing of your dissertation, and lead to a double PhD (based on a single dissertation), from UIC and the external institution jointly.
  • Koch Foundation Dissertation Grants supports work on free societies and ideas, institutions, and values that contribute to maximize well-being.