Become a Radcliffe Fellow
By Ōtepoti He Puna Auaha | Dunedin UNESCO City Of Literature | Posted: Monday Aug 04, 2025
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 makes a significant impact in their fields and the wider world. Fellows join a uniquely interdisciplinary and creative community. The program supports engaged scholarship, enabling fellows to develop new tools and methods, challenge artistic and scholarly conventions, and illuminate both past and present. Applications are encouraged from scholars and artists proposing innovative work that addresses pressing social and policy issues and aims to engage audiences beyond academia.
Application Details
The online application for the 2026–2027 fellowship year is now open.
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 PM ET.
Applicants may apply individually or as a team of two working on the same project. The program values diversity across disciplines, career stages, and all dimensions of identity and experience.
About the Fellowship Program
The Radcliffe Fellowship Program supports 50 scholars, artists, and public intellectuals who have demonstrated records of achievement in their fields and show strong potential for future contributions.
Throughout the fellowship year, fellows meet regularly to share work in progress, participate in intellectual groups, and build connections through social events. Fellows benefit from access to Harvard’s libraries and archives, professional development opportunities, and engagement with Harvard College students through the Radcliffe Research Partnership Program, which provides research assistance and opportunities for intellectual collaboration.
Fellowship Program Details
The program emphasizes engaged scholarship and invites proposals that:
Confront pressing social and policy issues.
Seek to engage audiences beyond academia.
Focus on women, gender, and society or draw on the Schlesinger Library’s collections, reflecting Radcliffe’s institutional legacy.
Align with Radcliffe’s multi-year focus areas, including:
Academic freedom and connecting across difference, addressing issues such as intellectual diversity, political polarization, peace and conflict, and inequality, as well as proposals that challenge disciplinary orthodoxies or introduce transformative perspectives.
Climate change, particularly projects exploring questions of impact and equity.
Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics in areas directly affected by reductions in federal research funding.