HPE Summer Research Grant

Call for applications: The History & Political Economy Project (HPE) invites applications from PhD students and early-career scholars for our 2025 summer research grant. This program will support awardees to undertake research in summer 2025 on topics related to our mission to understand how neoliberalism has been developed, implemented, and contested around the world. In support of our goal of producing historical scholarship that is strategically useful for addressing the challenges of social-political transformation in the present, HPE will support historical research that explores one or more of the following areas:

• the temporal development of neoliberalism, examining how neoliberal ideology and policy has changed over time;
• the scale of neoliberal thought and practice, taking seriously the variegated global instantiations of neoliberalism from the family and the workplace to the multinational corporation and the international institution; and/or 
• the ideas-in-action of neoliberalism and its contestations, pushing beyond intellectual histories to investigate questions of policymaking, institution building, and especially political contestation. 

Details: HPE will award grants of between $3,000 and $4,000 each, for research to be completed in summer 2025. Graduate and early-career scholars are those studying for a PhD or who have obtained a PhD within the last 5 years. Field of study is open, and we welcome applicants from any discipline, but methodologies and research questions should be explicitly historical. Eligible expenses include travel and accommodation costs for archival or other historical research work; digitization and transcription costs; hiring of local researchers; or similar activities. 

Timeline: Applications will be due on March 9th, 2025, and we expect to announce the awardees in April. Awardees will be required to submit a report detailing their research activities and outlining their findings by October 1, 2025, and will be invited to present their research at an HPE conference in December 2025.

Application Process: Please fill out our application form here and submit the following as a single PDF:

• Project description that conveys the research question, historical methods, archival or other sources, and significance of the work, as well as its connection to the mission of the HPE Project and one of the substantive areas listed above. This should not exceed 1,000 words. 
• One page bibliography
• A brief budget detailing expected expenses, as well as the timeline for completion of the research.
• CV

Questions about the grant should be directed to info@hpeproject.org.