Brief Description:

Fellowships are available at:

• USA
  • Harry Ransom Center
  • Huntington Library
  • Library of Congress
  • Smithsonian Institution
  • Yale Centre for British Art
• Japan
  • National Institutes for the Humanities (NIHU)
• China
  • Shanghai Theatre Academy

You will receive £1,000 for travel and visa costs (£1,200 for travel to Japan and China) and £1,925 for each month of the fellowship. You can apply for two to six months of funding.

Please refer to the ‘Additional Information’ for more information on the aims of the scheme and an overview of each host.

Who is eligible to apply

Individual eligibility for PhD students

AHRC-funded doctoral students can apply to any host. ESRC-funded doctoral students can only apply to Library of Congress.

Placements must be undertaken during the funded period of your doctoral award.

PhD students must include their doctoral training grant reference in the ‘About you’ section of the application form.

Because these fellowships are intended to enrich and form part of the period of doctoral study, no additional time will be added to the doctoral award end date.

Individual eligibility for ECRs

At the point of application, you must have a contract with a UK research organisation that extends beyond the end date of the International Placement Scheme (IPS) fellowship, and be either within:

• eight years of the award of your PhD or equivalent professional training
• six years of your first academic appointment

These durations should exclude any period of career break. We define a career break as an extended period of time when you have not been actively engaged in scholarly research or teaching at a higher education institution. The career break could be, for example, for family care or health reasons. See section two of AHRC’s research funding guide for further information on the eligibility criteria for early career researchers.

Doctoral level research assistants are eligible – you must:

• be of postdoctoral standing, having either a PhD qualification or equivalent research experience
• and have a contract with a UK research organisation at the time of application that extends beyond the end date of the IPS fellowship

You will be asked to provide evidence of how you meet this criteria. Failure to do so could result in your application being rejected. Where previous AHRC funding has been held, ECRs must include their previous grant reference in the application form.

Equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI)

We invite applications from eligible doctoral students, and early career researchers in any arts and humanities discipline (and doctoral students in the social sciences for the Library of Congress) and from all regions and nations of the UK.

We are committed to promoting the values of equality of opportunity, diversity, and inclusivity. A dynamic, diverse and inclusive research and innovation system must be an integral part of UK society, giving everyone the opportunity to participate and to benefit. Therefore, we particularly encourage applications from persons who identify as:

• an ethnic minority
• people with health conditions or impairments
• persons of diverse gender identities and expressions
• persons identifying with other groups who are currently underrepresented

Disabled applicants may request an appropriate amount of additional funding where this is essential to taking up the fellowship and where it cannot be provided by routes such as the UKRI disabled students allowance. Applicants requiring this additional support should contact AHRC for further guidance and to discuss how to reflect this request within the application form.

Applications to UKRI through the new Funding Service can only be made if you have completed our EDI survey, which you are prompted to do when you open an account. However, diversity information will never be used in the assessment process nor to make funding decisions.

Host-specific eligibility

Applicants to NIHU, looking to work with the following collections, are required to speak and understand Japanese to an advanced level:

• National Institute of Japanese Literature (NIJL)
• National Museum of Japanese History (NMJH)
• (Depending on the research field) International Research Center for Japanese Studies (IRCJS)

For all other NIHU institutes, a knowledge of basic (conversational) Japanese is useful, but not compulsory.

Applicants to the Smithsonian Institution must select, and approach a contact, at the Institution in advance of submitting their application. This contact will act as an adviser should the respective application be successful. Please use the 2022 Smithsonian opportunities for research and study guide in order to contact an appropriate Smithsonian academic or staff member.

Apply Here:

https://funding-service.ukri.org/OPP275/apply/286