Woodrow Wilson Fellowships

by Henry Farrell on September 8, 2011

I’ve just returned to teaching after a year’s fellowship at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. It’s a great place for anyone who wants to write a book (although you usually are expected to have completed one book already before applying), with good conversation (fellows are usually historians, social scientists or journalists) good offices, and a lot of intellectual activity. The Fellowship application page is here. If you think that it sounds interesting, and are able to transplant to DC for a year, I really recommend it (and am happy to provide advice in comments as needs be).

{ 6 comments }

1

andrew 09.08.11 at 1:29 am

I’ve always wondered what it is that the Centers and Foundations “get” out of providing fellowships? I mean, the fellow often leaves after a year or so after the book is done and goes back to his/her original institution, and I don’t quite see how the fellowship-providing institution benefits from this. That being said, I’m glad fellowships exist

2

LFC 09.08.11 at 2:22 pm

@1:
Presumably many such institutions are required under the terms of their original money (not the right technical phrase, but you know what I mean) to provide fellowships. Plus they get to put “written under the auspices of” inside the resulting books and the authors acknowledge, often profusely, the help the institutions have provided. Authors in countless prefaces/acknowledgments over the years have extolled the wonderful aspects of the institutions which gave them this or that fellowship and such praise constitutes, of course, a form of advertising for the institution. One of the most fulsome examples I’ve run across is Morton Kaplan’s acknowledgments in his System and Process in International Politics (1957), where he rhapsodizes for an entire paragraph about the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. (I never managed to get much beyond the acknowledgments in that book but that’s neither here nor there.)

3

Freddie 09.10.11 at 7:30 pm

If only it wasn’t named after Woodrow Wilson.

4

32Groove 09.10.11 at 8:52 pm

@Freddie:
What prompts you to make that statement?

5

Phil 09.11.11 at 8:35 am

Freddie – on’tday entionmay the edRay areScay.

6

J. Otto Pohl 09.11.11 at 12:51 pm

Maybe because Wilson was the most racist president since Andrew Jackson and got the US involved in a war in Europe that did little to serve US interests.

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