Graduate Fellowships, Grants & Awards

The College of Arts and Humanities awards funds to support the professional development of its graduate students through the presentation of original work. These awards are for competitive presentations of scholarship or creative works at national and international conferences. 

Eligible expenses will include conference fees and travel expenses for domestic and international conferences. The DGS must request approval from the college for international travel.

Criteria for Awards:

• Conference or presentation must include a competitive or peer-reviewed selection process.  Presenters can now apply without having yet received notice of acceptance, but are asked to note this on the application form.
• Conference must be national or international (i.e. not a regional conference)
• Participation will promote students’ professional advancement in their discipline

General Guidelines:

Priority will be given to students at the end of their graduate careers participating in national or international conferences of major professional organizations and students who have not received an ARHU travel award in the past. 

Complete applications must be submitted on time into the online system to be considered for the current round. This also is the deadline for Graduate Program Director recommendations; therefore, students should check with their departments for internal deadlines in advance of the college deadline. The online application system will close at midnight on the deadlines below.

College deadline (for students and departments to submit materials online):
Round I: Friday, October 18, 2024
Round II: Friday, December 2, 2024
Round III:  Friday, April 18, 2025

Eligible travel dates start at the beginning of the 2024-25 academic year until 10/15/2025.

Application Process:
 
Students should go to apply.arhu.umd.edu and click on Travel Awards, provide all the information, and submit the application. Students can work on an application, save, and come back to the site as well, so they don’t have to complete the full application at once. The application process for Travel Awards is entirely online. No paper applications will be accepted.

The information requested includes: 

• Short CV (5 page max.)
• Brief description (no more than two paragraphs) of the research to be presented, its significance in the field, and the format of the presentation (e.g. panel, poster presentation, performance, exhibition, etc.). Please keep in mind that your research should be contextualized for non-specialists
• Brief description of the conference, its organizing body, and the review process for the accepted research
• Statement of the contribution the conference will make to your career
• Statement of other funding sources (e.g. Goldhaber Travel Awards from the Graduate School). Students are encouraged to apply for outside funding.
• Estimated costs
• Copy of the letter/email accepting the presentation, if available

NOTE: Graduate program directors are asked to submit recommendations and a ranking for each application from their units via the online application system. Priority will be given to students attending national or international conferences of major professional organizations and to students who have not received an ARHU travel award in the past.

• ARHU Graduate Travel Awards FAQ
• Instructions to DGS
• Call to Graduate Students

For further information, please contact Betsy Yuen at myuen@umd.edu.

The Graduate School's Jacob K. Goldhaber Travel Grants are intended to help defray the expenses incurred by graduate students who are traveling to scholarly, scientific, or professional conferences to present papers, posters or other scholarly material. 

The International Conference Student Support Award (ICSSA) will reimburse a graduate student’s conference registration fee up to $500. To be eligible, a graduate student must be presenting a paper, poster or other research or creative material at a major, international scholarly, scientific or professional conference that is held outside the United States.

Eligible graduate students are invited to submit applications for international travel up until the first day of the conference. Funds will be distributed on a first come, first serve basis. Graduate students are eligible to receive the ICSSA twice, once before candidacy (which includes both doctoral and MA students) and a second time after the achievement of candidacy (doctoral students only).

If you have any questions, please contact Robyn Kotzker at (301) 405-0281.

The College of Arts and Humanities is seeking nominations for the Mary Savage Snouffer Dissertation Fellowship for 2025-2026. The Mary S. Snouffer Scholarship Fund will support up to two fellowships for qualified students pursuing the doctorate in any discipline in the humanities. Preference will be given to students in English, but scholarships can be awarded to students in other disciplines within ARHU. Criteria for selection shall be based upon both academic merit and need. Each doctoral studies program should put forward its very best candidate and none should submit more than two nominations. Proposals should be written with a nonspecialist audience in mind.

Applicant Requirements:

• Must be a graduate student who has reached the dissertation stage. 
• Must have completed all coursework and passed the qualifying examination for the doctoral degree. 
• Students receiving the Mary Savage Snouffer Dissertation Fellowship are expected to enroll full-time and to devote full time to work on their dissertation. To be certified as a full-time student, recipients of the Fellowship must be officially registered for 6 credits of 899. 
• Recipients are not allowed to hold on- or off-campus jobs of more than ten hours per week. 
• If research requires IRB approval, it must be secured or in the works at time of application

Benefits:
The 9.5-month stipend for the fellowship for the 2025-26 academic year does not cover health benefits and is not tax exempt.

The Graduate School has agreed to provide candidacy tuition awards for each fellowship recipient that will cover six credits of dissertation research (899) for each fellow for the fall and spring semesters. Students taking additional credits will have to pay for them themselves. They will process all paperwork through Student Financial Aid at http://www.financialaid.umd.edu or 301-314-9000. The fellowship is non-renewable.

Deadline:
Nominations for the Mary Savage Snouffer Dissertation Fellowship must be received by Friday, April 18, 2025 at midnight. Students wishing to apply should contact their Graduate Program Directors for departmental deadlines, which will be earlier.

Nomination packets should include:

• Nomination letter (by Chair or Graduate Director)
• Project description (2-3 pages) from the nominee. Within the project description, please also outline progress already made, as well as a timeline/schedule for completing the dissertation.
• Copy of the nominee's CV
• Letter of recommendation from the nominee's advisor

Nomination packets must be uploaded as a single pdf attachment through the ARHU online application portal at https://apply.arhu.umd.edu/. For additional information, please contact Betsy Yuen at myuen@umd.edu.

Download a printable version of these guidelines.

2024-2025 Mary Savage Snouffer Dissertation Fellowship Recipients:

• Da Som Lee, English, “Finding Asia in Asian American Literature”
• Charlotte Joublot, French, “Indigeneity and Resilience: Decolonizing Artistic and Literary Voices from Oceania through a Regional Identity (from 1970 to Present)?
• Nicole Steinberg, Music, “Witness Bearing in Holocaust Musical Presentation: Confronting Trauma in Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s Opera, The Passenger”
• Honorable Mention: Valeria Iacovelli, Art History and Archaeology, “Planetary Visions: Photography and Environmentalism in the Age of Climate Change

2023-2024 Mary Savage Snouffer Dissertation Fellowship Recipients:

• Fredrick Cherry, Jr., English, “A Black Gay Sensibility: Art, Affect, and Black Male Relationality”
• Jocelyn Coates, WGSS, “Dark Sousveillance: Queer Intimacies and Sensorial Registers of Black/white Interraciality”
• Honorable Mention: Zachary Johnson, American Studies, “Queer Specters of the Liberal Intellectual: Knowledge, Desire, and Respectability in the Poetics of Study”

2022-2023 Mary Savage Snouffer Dissertation Fellowship Recipients: 

• Xinqian Qiu, American Studies, “Sustaining Intersectional Identities through Heritage Preservation in Physical Places and Virtual Spaces: A Study of the Lunar New Year Celebrations in Chinatown, Ethnoburb, and WeChat”
• Jared Strange, TDPS, “After Bend It Like Beckham: Soccer in 21st Century Theatre and Performance”
• Dominique Young, English, “For the 90s and the 2000s: Black Women’s Performative Subversion in Popular Literary and Visual Culture”

The College of Arts and Humanities will accept nominations for the University of Maryland’s Charles A. Caramello Distinguished Dissertation Award. Eligible candidates are UMD doctoral degree graduates who have defended their dissertation to the Graduate School in the 2024 calendar year. Students who defended in 2024, but will graduate in May 2025 are eligible. Each ARHU unit may nominate one dissertation to the college.

The deadline for submitting nominations for the 2025 Distinguished Dissertation Award to the college is January 31, 2025. ARHU is able to submit up to four nominations for the award and the deadline for those submissions to the Graduate School is February 26, 2025.

The Charles A. Caramello Distinguished Dissertation Award recognizes original work that makes an unusually significant contribution to the discipline. Awards will be given each year in four broad disciplinary areas: 1) Mathematics, Physical Sciences, and Engineering; 2) Social Sciences; 3) Humanities and Fine Arts; and 4) Biological and Life Sciences. Recipients will receive a $1000 honorarium and may be nominated for the CGS/ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award. For more information on the University Award: https://gradschool.umd.edu/funding/student-fellowships-awards/distinguished-dissertation-award

Nominations must include: 

A single PDF attachment to include the following required elements of the nomination package (with bookmarks, if possible), in the following order:

• Distinguished Dissertation Award Nomination Form cover sheet (available here), including a link to the full dissertation on DRUM.
• a letter of recommendation from the dissertation supervisor that evaluates the significance and quality of the dissertation and indicates one chapter the ARHU committee should read in detail.
• a letter from the college (to be appended to the finalist's nomination, as per the Graduate School guidelines). 
• a 5-page, double-spaced abstract of the dissertation in PDF form: 
  • Written by the nominee for a non-specialist audience 
  • Each page of the abstract should be numbered and bear the name of the nominee
  • Appendices containing non-textual material, such as charts or tables, may be included in addition to the 5 pages
• a brief nominee CV, not to exceed 4 pages. 

ARHU nominations should be submitted through the online application portal: http://apply.arhu.umd.edu. The portal will be open for nominations from January 13, 2024 through the deadline on January 31, 2025 at 5 p.m. The department and graduate program director is responsible for compiling the necessary components. Please contact Betsy Yuen at myuen@umd.edu with any questions.

Caramello Distinguished Dissertation Award guidelines and nomination forms are available here.

Past ARHU Recipients:

2022 Humanities and Fine Arts
Nahid Ahmadian, Ph.D., Comparative Literature
Dissertation Title: “The Development of Theater in Post-revolutionary Iran from 1979 to 1997” 
Dissertation Advisor: Fatemeh Keshavarz

2021 Recipients
Humanities and Fine Arts

Samuel Miner, Ph.D., History
Dissertation Title: “The Exiles’ Return: Emigres, Anti-Nazis, and the Basic Law”
Dissertation Advisor: Jeffrey Herf

Social Sciences

Tangere Hoagland, Ph.D., Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies 
Dissertation Title: “When Surviving is Illegal: Black Women and the Entrapment of U.S. Incarceration and Welfare” 
Dissertation Advisor: Michelle Rowley

Graduate Student Summer Research Fellowships provide support for research activities for outstanding doctoral students at “mid-career” with plans to graduate after August 2026. Summer Research Fellowships typically carry stipends of $5,000. 

Programs must submit their nominations to The Graduate School. 

Deadline: Wednesday, March 5, 2025.

Note: Students should consult their Director of Graduate Studies for their doctoral program’s internal deadline. 

For more information, guidelines, instructions and nomination form, see The Graduate School website.

The Ann G. Wylie Dissertation Fellowship is part of The Graduate School's Semester Dissertation Fellowship Program. It provides support to UMD doctoral candidates who are in the latter stages of writing their dissertations. The Wylie is a full-time fellowship and recipients can choose to use the fellowship in either Fall 2025 or Spring 2026. Fellowship benefits include a $15,000 stipend, a candidacy tuition award, a credit for mandatory fees and reimbursement for the purchase of an individual student health insurance plan for the semester.  

Eligibility: Eligible candidates are current UMD doctoral students who will have advanced to candidacy by June 1, 2025 and expect to graduate by August 2026.

Each department or program may submit two nominations. Programs must submit their nominations by February 12, 2025 at noon to The Graduate School. 

Note: Students should consult their Director of Graduate Studies for their doctoral program’s internal deadline. 

For more information, guidelines, and forms, see The Graduate School website.

The College of Arts and Humanities holds the first annual competition for the Bonnie Thornton Dill Dean’s Graduate Research Award. This award supports research or creative practice in the areas of race, gender, and inequality, in particular the study intersectionality, which is defined as scholarship that examines interconnectedness of race, gender and inequality (in such areas as ethnicity, class, disability, sexuality, religion, nationality). The award is made annually in the minimum amount of $1,500.

Nomination Process

• Applicants should compose a two-page application describing how their research relates to the study of intersectionality in particular and/or to the study of race, gender, and inequality more generally. This application is submitted to the student’s home department/program, along with current contact information and UID number. 
• The department must submit a letter of support for their nominee, written by a faculty member who can speak to the student’s suitability for this award. The letter can come from the student’s research advisor; it does not have to be written by the Director of Graduate Studies.
• Each unit may submit one nomination for the Thornton Dill Research Award. The nominated student may be either at the Master’s level or the Doctoral level. 
• Both the student's description and the department's nomination letter should be submitted together in one PDF through the online application system.

To submit a nomination, the nominator should log onto https://apply.arhu.umd.edu/, select the Bonnie Thornton Dill Dean’s Graduate Research Award, complete each field, and upload a single PDF containing the student's description and the department's nomination letter.

The online portal will begin accepting nominations on Friday, November 8, 2024.

Deadline: Monday, December 2, 2024 at midnight.

Download a printable copy of these guidelines. 

2023-24 Bonnie Thornton Dill Award Recipient: 

• Devon Betts, American Studies

The College of Arts and Humanities holds the annual competition for the James. F. Harris Arts and Humanities Visionary Scholarship. This award honors the humanities and arts in action. Past recipients have demonstrated a well-rounded approach to service and community engagement in addition to their scholarship.

Nomination Process:

• Applicants should compose a two-page application describing how their breadth of interests and activities exemplify key principles of an arts and humanities education. This application is submitted to the student’s home department/program, along with current contact information and UID number. 
• The department must submit a letter of support for their nominee, written by a faculty member who can speak to the student’s suitability for this award. The letter can come from the student’s research advisor; it does not have to be written by the Director of Graduate Studies.
• Each unit may submit one nomination for the Harris Scholarship. The nominated student may be either at the Master’s level or the Doctoral level. 
• Both the student's description and the department's nomination letter should be submitted together in one PDF through the online application system.

To submit a nomination, the nominator should log onto https://apply.arhu.umd.edu/, select the James Harris Arts and Humanities Visionary Scholarship application, complete each field, and upload a single PDF containing the student's description and the department's nomination letter.

The online portal will begin accepting nominations on Friday, November 8, 2024.

Deadline: Monday, December 2, 2024 at midnight.

Download a printable copy of these guidelines.

2023-24 James F. Harris Visionary Scholarship Recipients:

• Yanzhang (Tony) Cui, Art History & Archaeology 
• Carolyn Robbins, Communication
• Melissa Sturges, Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies

2022-23 James F. Harris Visionary Scholarship Recipients:

• Elizabeth Catchmark, English
• Jordan Ealey, Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies

2021-22 James F. Harris Visionary Scholarship Recipients:

• Darrian Carroll, Communication
• Wanda Hernandez, American Studies

The Graduate School invites colleges to choose graduate students for Outstanding Graduate Assistant Awards for exemplary achievement as a graduate assistant. The Graduate School will award 80 Outstanding Graduate Assistant Awards.

ARHU may nominate up to 9 graduate assistants for this award, all of whom will receive the award from the Graduate School. While the award does not carry a cash prize, it conveys the honor of being named among the top 2% of campus GAs in a given year as well as a credit for mandatory fees for the spring 2025 semester.

To be eligible for this award, GAs must be currently enrolled Master’s or Doctoral students holding at least a half-time graduate assistantship (TA, RA, AA) for the Fall 2024 and spring 2025 semesters.

To submit nominations to the ARHU Graduate Awards and Fellowships Committee: 

• Each unit may nominate one graduate assistant for every 20 graduate assistants employed, up to a maximum of two. If the unit nominates two students, please include a ranking order. 
• The awards can be made in three categories: Outstanding Graduate Teaching Assistant, Outstanding Graduate Research Assistant, and Outstanding Graduate Administrative Assistant. 
• Nominators must complete the Outstanding Assistant Award Nomination Sheet for each nomination and submit it to the college as a single PDF to Betsy Yuen at myuen@umd.edu. If attaching a separate letter for your justification for nominating the student rather than using the included text box, the length must be no more than one page.
• ARHU GAs working in units outside of ARHU are eligible for this award. If you are aware of an outstanding GA from your unit who works for another campus entity, please consider contacting their supervisor to help draft the nominating paragraph.

The deadline for receipt of nominations to the ARHU Dean’s office is Wednesday, January 8, 2025. The college will then submit its selections to the Graduate School by the deadline of Wednesday, January 29, 2025.

Further information and the nomination sheet are available here. Please direct questions to Robyn Kotzker, Assistant Director for the Office of Funding Opportunities (rkotzker@umd.edu, 301-405- 0281).

The Graduate School currently offers four prestigious endowed awards: the Dr. Mabel S. Spencer Award for Excellence in Graduate Achievement; the Dr. James W. Longest Memorial Award for Social Science Research; the Michael J. Pelczar Award for Excellence in Graduate Study; and the Phi Delta Gamma Graduate Fellowship.

Nominations: Due to the Graduate School by March 5, 2025. Updated award guidelines and nomination forms are available below on The Graduate School website.