"Finding Money" Roundtable Talk
Professor David Brewer, Department of English, The Ohio State University
ASECS Annual Meeting, March 2009, Richmond

I’m here in two capacities, as someone who has successfully applied for a range of kinds of funding (from my own institutions, from a local foundation, from research libraries and a humanities center, from the NEH) and as someone who has sat on the other side of the proverbial desk (again for my own institution, for ASECS, for the NEH) and helped figure out how best to award our limited funds. These two roles have become intertwined in my mind—I’m a better applicant for having been a reviewer and vice versa—and so what I have to say today has me wearing both hats simultaneously.

I think it’s safe to say that the most successful applicants are the ones who are not only smart and doing interesting things (there are far more of those than most funders can support), but who are also a good “fit” with the funders’ aims and desires. So here are some tips for how to try to achieve that “fit.”

First, think about what you want from this funding. Do you just need time away from the classroom? Do you need access to specific collections? Do you just want a more general access to collections that are better than those in your current locale? Do you want or need to be in a particular place or to have access to a certain set of people?

Once you’ve figured out what you want from this funding, think seriously and realistically about what constraints there are upon you. Can you up and relocate or do you have commitments that tie you to a specific location or a particular schedule? The fewer constraints you have, the more potential options are open, but you don’t want to be shooting yourself in the foot either personally or professionally.

Next, research what’s out there in terms of funding, think about which opportunities would get you to where you want to go, and then apply as widely as you can within that list.

Not counting whatever’s available from your own institution, there are four basic kinds of funding for scholarship in the humanities in the U.S. (though I should hasten to add that if you’re not a U.S. citizen, you should make sure you investigate possibilities from your home country as well).

1. fellowships, generally for a year, with no residency requirement (these would include the fellowships offered by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Guggenheim Foundation, and a few others).
   
2. long-term residential fellowships (these tend to be connected to centers, whether part of a university—the Stanford Humanities Center, the McNeil Center at Penn—or stand-alone places like the National Humanities Center in North Carolina or the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton). Most major research libraries and a few museums also offer this sort of fellowship (places like the American Antiquarian Society, the Newberry, or the Getty). And, of course, there are also long-term residential fellowships tied to work in a specific foreign country (Fulbrights from the U.S. government, Alexander Humboldt fellowships to work in Germany, etc.). Some long-term residential fellowships are also restricted by rank (usually you have within x years of receiving the doctorate: four or six or ten).
   
3. short-term residential fellowships. These tend to be sponsored by libraries or museums and run a month or three. Because they’re shorter (and so cheaper to fund), they’re considerably more plentiful than the long-term fellowships.
   
4. funds to support research costs or travel to collections. These tend to be offered by learned societies like ASECS or the American Philosophical Society or the Bibliographical Society of America. Some foreign governments also have programs along these lines.

As you research the possibilities and think about which to pursue, try to get a sense of what each funder values or looks for. Sometimes this will be explicit in their instructions to applicants; other times you’ll have to do some detective work. Look at what or whom they’ve funded in the past; see if any of the language in their mission statements or annual reports seems particularly loaded. Some funders will give you copies of past successful applications. If you have colleagues who’ve received outside funding, they also may be willing to share their materials. Exercise all your close reading skills upon these documents and see if there are any rhetorical tricks you can reverse-engineer. You don’t want to be slavish in your copying (and the voice of your application has to sound “yours”), but there are definitely family resemblances between successful applications and it can’t hurt to make yourself look like a recently discovered and very attractive cousin of that family.

In general, the four kinds of funding I just sketched out look for different things, although you shouldn’t presume that within a given category funders are wholly interchangeable with one another (the NEH is not the Guggenheim Foundation, nor—I suspect—is the Folger the Yale Center for British Art).

That said, however, the long-term nonresidential fellowships are generally looking for a big bang for their buck. The work (in most cases the default presumption is still that this will take the form of a book) which will come out of your fellowship is expected to make a significant and lasting contribution. These funders are adding luster to your reputation and they expect you to return the favor.

Long-term residential fellowships are also looking for a big bang, but they tend to be additionally concerned with what you’ll add to their specific community (here the process is, I suspect, a little like college admissions: they’re looking for a group which will productively cross-fertilize, both with one another and with interested local parties; there’s often an explicit social component to these fellowships: the fellows all regularly have lunch or tea together). In the case of libraries and museums, they’re also looking for evidence that you’re going to make good and extensive use of their holdings, especially their unique holdings (in this age of full-text databases, it’s much harder to persuade a library to pay for you to come cross country just to read text that’s available on your desktop back home).

The “will you make good use of our holdings?” criterion is, I suspect, even more important for the short-term fellowships offered by libraries and museums. They want to see that your time there will be spent looking closely at the cool stuff which makes them distinctive, not pouring over your tattered paperback copy of Agamben.

And with the research and travel funds offered by learned societies and foreign governments, the grantmakers tend to look for whether the proposed expenses (and you usually need to prepare a budget for such) will significantly enhance your work and move it along toward publication. Will going to that archive in Jamaica enrich your scholarship in ways that will clearly increase its impact down the line? Or are you just angling for someone to underwrite your vacation? It’s easier than you might think to tell the difference.

Finally, of course, in addition to all the criteria I’ve just spelled out, some funders impose demographic restrictions as well: gender, ethnicity, age. If you don’t honestly meet those criteria, don’t waste your time applying.

Make sure that you begin all this research and thinking quite far in advance. Most funders only accept applications once a year; a few do so even less often than that: the Howard Foundation at Brown has disciplines on a six-year rotation. If you missed out on the fellowships in history this year, you’ll have to wait until 2015). Plus you’ll need time both to really polish your materials and to solicit the necessary letters of recommendation.

Once you’ve figured out which funders you’ll be approaching, read their instructions to applicants and follow them to the letter. If they want a three hundred-word précis and a five-page proposal, don’t try to exceed that. At best, you’ll lose some good will. At worst, your application will be rejected out of hand or, if you’re applying electronically, won’t even be uploaded.

When you’re writing the various documents you need for your application, keep your audience in mind. Most of these proposals are going to be read by people not in your subfield, quite possibly not in your field, and potentially not even in your discipline. Your readers will generally be broadly curious and catholic-minded, but their sense of your field may be in part based upon a fading memory of their own undergraduate education or on something they’ve only taught in a survey. Be crystal clear (if you can also be stylish, that’s a plus, but clarity and ease of reading trump stylistic flourish) and make sure that the stakes of what you’re proposing will be readily apparent to someone who isn’t steeped in the quarrels and debates in which you’ve now been engaged for some years.

Once you think you have the documents down, run them by as many trusted readers as you can, including people from outside your field (and, if possible, people who don’t know much about your work and so can’t connect the dots on your behalf). Pay attention to where they stumble and give very serious thought to how you can prevent similar stumbling on the part of those who will be evaluating your application. Lots and lots of rejections will have to be made (of the roughly forty-five NEH proposals I reviewed last summer, only two were ultimately funded) and so it’s in your interest to make it as hard as possible for your application to be among those turned down.

Make sure that you also run your documents by your recommenders, both so that they know what you’re proposing and can tailor their letters to your proposal—and they really should do so; a copy of your job market dossier isn’t nearly as effective for these purposes—and so that they can have a chance to offer their own suggestions (since most of them will have gone through one or both sides of this process before). And when you’re thinking about whom to ask for recommendations (especially if you’ve already had your degree in hand for more than a year or two), do try to branch out and get some people who weren’t on your dissertation committee. You should always choose the recommenders who can write the strongest, most detailed letters on your behalf, but if they’re also people who don’t have an institutional obligation to help you, people whom you’ve simply impressed with your scholarship (say, on the conference circuit or with a journal article), that’s only going to work to your advantage, especially if there’s the possibility for some beneficial name recognition.

Finally, and this is really a different way of putting my earlier point about keeping your audience in mind, I’ve found it can be useful to remember that there’s an element of courtship involved here. Not that you’re specifically trying to entice a funder into a candlelit dinner, much less your bed, but you are seeking something you want which the funder has the power to grant or deny, and which, if done properly and with a bit of luck, should prove satisfying and mutually beneficial for all involved. That is, you’re presenting the best, most attractive, most appealing version of yourself (and you should think about what that is: theoretical bravura, astonishing feats of archival recovery, a winning prose style), but as in courtship that presentational self needs to bear enough of a resemblance to your quotidian self to be plausible, to allow for the suspension of disbelief which will, you hope, sweep your intended off his or her (or, since we’re generally talking about institutions, its) feet. Needless to say, as in courtship, any whiff of bitterness, distraction, desperation, or dogged going through the motions is going to be an almost instant turn-off.

One last twist on this analogy, since this is a roundtable on “finding money,” rather than just “applying for external funding.” I’ve always had my doubts about how well René Girard’s concept of mimetic desire describes the European novel. But it captures the North American academy perfectly. We like what other people like (and we tend to like it in direct proportion to how many other people like it and how strongly they do so). So, while I would never encourage you to be coquettes or to play the field, do know that a proven ability to attract the attentions of funders can nicely translate into more money from your home institution. It may not be equitable (and, in this economy, it may not be sustainable), but at least as of now, it’s the way of the world and you might as well try to make it work on your behalf.

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