Radcliffe Fellowship Program in Humanities, Social Sciences, and Creative Arts
A fellowship year at Harvard Radcliffe Institute is an opportunity to step away from usual routines and dive deeply into a project.
Radcliffe fellows are exceptional scientists, writers, scholars, public intellectuals, and artists whose work is making a difference in their professional fields and in the larger world. Fellows join a uniquely interdisciplinary and creative community. Radcliffe supports engaged scholarship, where fellows develop new tools and methods, challenge artistic and scholarly conventions, and illuminate our past and our present. We welcome applications from scholars and artists proposing innovative work that confronts pressing social and policy issues and seeking to engage audiences beyond academia.
“A year at Radcliffe was everything I could ask for. The gifts of time and space elevated the way I thought about my work. After many, many years, I felt truly free to explore my craft.”
—2022–2023 Radcliffe fellow
Application Details
Our online application for the 2026–2027 fellowship year is now available.
The deadline for applications in humanities, social sciences, and creative arts is September 11, 2025, 11:59 PM ET.
The deadline for applications in science, engineering, and mathematics is September 30, 2025, 11:59 ET.
Applicants may apply as individuals or in groups of two people working on the same project. We seek diversity across discipline, career stage, race and ethnicity, country of origin, gender and sexual orientation, and ideological perspective. Although our fellows come from many different backgrounds, they are united by their demonstrated excellence, collegiality, and creativity.
The Radcliffe Fellowship Program supports 50 scholars, artists, and public intellectuals who have demonstrated records of achievement in their respective fields and show great promise for future contributions.
Throughout the year, fellows convene regularly to share their work in progress, supporting one another in various intellectual groups and building connections through social events. They benefit from access to Harvard’s libraries and archives, to professional development opportunities, and to Harvard college students through participating in the Radcliffe Research Partnership Program. In this program, students intellectually engage with fellows and their projects by researching sources, reviewing book chapters, discussing new approaches to projects, and more.
Watch previous public fellows’ presentation series.
“This fellowship was the most inspiring and generative year of my scholarly life to date. The opportunity to meet and talk with people from such different areas of expertise expanded my horizons beyond measure.”
—2018–2019 Radcliffe fellow
Fellowship Program Details
Radcliffe supports engaged scholarship. We welcome applications from scholars and artists proposing innovative work that confronts pressing social and policy issues and seeking to engage audiences beyond academia.
Reflecting Radcliffe’s unique history and institutional legacy, we welcome proposals that focus on women, gender, and society or draw on the Schlesinger Library’s rich collections.
We welcome proposals relevant to the Institute’s multi-year focus areas, which include the following:
- Academic freedom and connecting across difference, especially proposals addressing issues of intellectual diversity, political polarization, peace and conflict, inequality, and other policy issues as they relate to free inquiry at higher education institutions, as well as proposals that constructively challenge disciplinary orthodoxies or advance new and potentially transformative perspectives or approaches.
- Climate change, especially proposals addressing critical questions of impact and equity.
In addition, we welcome proposals in the areas of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics directly impacted by federal research funding cuts.
Eligibility Guidelines and Application Materials
