January 2018
Funding Opportunities in the Social Sciences

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Unless otherwise noted, all proposals to funders outside of Harvard must be submitted to the Office of Sponsored Programs (OSP) five business days prior to the sponsor deadline. We can help you navigate the routing process for your proposal.

Questions? Please contact Erin Hale, Senior Research Development Officer at 
erin_hale@fas.harvard.edu or 617-496-5252.
Internal Opportunities
For a more comprehensive list of Harvard internal funding opportunities, please see  here .
External Opportunities
Non-Federal Opportunities:
Federal Opportunities:
Internal Funding Opportunities
pfic
Deadline: May 18, 2018
Award Amount: Up to $20,000
Eligible Applicants: The designated faculty leader(s) must hold primary Harvard faculty appointments at the rank of Assistant, Associate, or Full Professor or senior non-ladder faculty appointments including Senior Lecturer, Senior Preceptor, and Professor of Practice.
 
The Provost Fund for Interfaculty Collaboration (PFIC) was developed to promote faculty collaboration across multiple Harvard Schools. This fund can be used to support a variety of projects, including but not limited to cross-School interdisciplinary course support, research working groups, and small-scale conferences. The Fund will occasionally prioritize particular forms of collaboration, and during the 2017-2018 academic year, funding priority will be given to proposals intended to advance cross-School teaching. 
 
To be eligible for support, the designated faculty leader(s) must hold primary Harvard faculty appointments at the rank of Assistant, Associate, or Full Professor or senior non-ladder faculty appointments including Senior Lecturer, Senior Preceptor, and Professor of Practice, and the project must engage faculty and/or students from at least two Harvard Schools. Priority will be given to applicants who have not previously received funding from the grant. Colleagues from outside Harvard may be included as well.
 
These one-year grants should be considered seed money rather than continuing support. Funding should be expended within a year of the award. Preference will be given to proposals that illustrate the potential cross-School impact of funding (e.g., cross-listed courses, sponsored research opportunities, resulting scholarly products) as well as to proposals that leverage other resources (e.g., cost-sharing with a Department, School, or outside funder).
milton
Deadline: April 3, 2018
Award Amount: Up to $50,000
Eligible Applicants: Applications are invited from individuals who hold a junior faculty appointment. This includes Assistant Professors, Associate Professors, and Junior Fellows of the Harvard Society of Fellows.
 
The Milton Fund supports research projects in the fields of medicine, geography, history and science that promote the physical and material welfare and prosperity of the human race, investigate and determine the value and importance of any discovery or invention, or assist in the discovery and perfecting of any special means of alleviating or curing human disease. Funds awarded through the Milton Fund support research to explore new ideas, to act as the catalyst between ideas and more definitive directions, and to consider new methods of approaching solutions. 
elson
Deadline: March 30, 2018
Award Amount: Up to $5,000
 
The Elson Family Arts Initiative fund supports undergraduate education in the arts and humanities and the integration of the arts into the curriculum within the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. This initiative is one of many activities created in response to the recommendations of the Harvard Task Force on the Arts. Course proposals may (but need not) involve collaborations across departments and divisions of the FAS. The Committee will only consider proposals that have a curricular connection and that show the prudent use of funds. As a general rule, priority will be given to proposals for art-making in courses where art-making has not traditionally been inserted. 
hilt
Deadline: March 21, 2018
Award Amount: Up to $15,000
Eligible Applicants: Harvard University benefits-eligible faculty, staff, and postdoctoral researchers are eligible to apply for funding, individually or as groups. 
 
Grants are designed to help "spark" promising teaching and learning projects from idea to reality and position innovations for future success. Funding can be used in various ways; for example, to pay for a research assistant, hire a graduate student with academic technology expertise, or convene collaborative groups. Through Spark Grants, awardees will receive resources, feedback, and community support to help them develop their ideas into prototypes, pilots, and small-scale innovations. HILT will also strive to support any future scaling-up of Spark Grant projects by increasing their visibility and connecting awardees and project outcomes with others in the broader Harvard community. In general, grant proposals should align with HILT's mission to catalyze innovation and excellence in teaching and learning at Harvard University.
star
Deadline: February 28, 2018
Award Amount: $20,000-$200,000 in direct costs (project budgets should not include indirect costs). In 2017, the average award size was $106,250. Up to five awards will be made annually.
Eligible Applicants: This competition is open to ladder faculty members in FAS and SEAS. Collaborative proposals are welcome but the lead investigator on the application must hold a faculty appointment in FAS or SEAS.
 
Established in 2013 by a generous gift to Harvard University at the suggestion of James A. Star, AB (1983), the Star Family Challenge for Promising Scientific Research provides seed funding to interdisciplinary high-risk, high-impact projects in the natural or social sciences. Early stage projects which are unlikely to receive funding from traditional grant-making agencies are encouraged. Award recipients will present and discuss their projects with a range of scholars in multiple disciplines at a Challenge event on April 9, 2018, prior to receipt of funding.
lemann
Deadline: January 29, 2018 - Deadline extended!
Award Amount: Up to $150,000 payable over one or two years
Target Applicants: Applications are invited from individuals who hold a faculty appointment at a Harvard school and who have principal investigator rights at that school.
 
Applications are invited from researchers across disciplines proposing research projects relating to Brazil. Proposals are sought for projects that address education management and administration; social science and its applications; public administration and policy; technological advances in education; and evidence-based research. Consideration will also be given to projects that propose collaboration between Harvard faculty and Brazilian academics in the life sciences, physical sciences and engineering, and basic and applied sciences.
 
Proposed projects must meet at least one of the following three criteria:
  1. Include collaboration with Brazilian academics
  2. Be undertaken in Brazil in whole or in part
  3. Focus on Brazil
canada
Deadline: Rolling
Award Amount: No specified funding limit

The Canada Program at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs invites proposals from Harvard faculty, departments, and schools across the University, for research funding, or for supporting the hosting of short-term visiting scholars, policy practitioners, and public figures who are engaged in Canadian comparative topics. Visiting Canadianists are welcome to present at Harvard faculty workshops and conferences, or to offer guest lectures for Harvard undergraduate and graduate students. 

Requests for funding should include a proposal with a brief description of the intellectual goals of the short-term visit, and a budget, and should be submitted to:  Canada@wcfia.harvard.edu
fhb
Deadline: Last day of February, May, August and November
Award Amount: $40,000 for ladder faculty; $5,000 for doctoral students and post-docs
Eligible Applicants: Harvard University full time doctoral students, post-doctoral fellows, and ladder faculty.

The FHBI provides seed grants to support transformative research in the social and behavioral sciences. Successful proposals will be those that promise to advance understanding of the social, institutional and biological mechanisms shaping human beliefs and behavior. Funds will be used to support interdisciplinary social science research projects based on innovative experimental or observational designs that make use of sophisticated quantitative methods. The Fund also supports seminars, conferences, and other research-related activities.
External Funding Opportunities
rsf
OSP review not required for letter of inquiry
Sponsor Letter of Inquiry Deadline: May 24, 2018
Award Amount: Up to $150,000

The Russell Sage Foundation dedicates itself exclusively to strengthening the methods, data, and theoretical core of the social sciences as a means of diagnosing social problems and improving social policies. For the May 2018 letter of inquiry deadline, Project and Presidential Awards will support social science research in the following program areas:
  • Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration: This program is concerned with the social, economic, and political effects of the changing racial and ethnic composition of the U.S. population, including the transformation of communities and ideas about what it means to be American.
  • Behavioral Economics: This program focuses on research that uses behavioral insights from psychology and other social sciences to examine and improve social and living conditions in the United States.
Letters of inquiry for the foundation's other regular programs, Future of Work and Social Inequality, will be accepted in August.
rsf_immigration
OSP review not required for letter of inquiry
Sponsor Letter of Inquiry Deadline: May 24, 2018
Award Amount: Up to $150,000

The Russell Sage Foundation/Carnegie Corporation Initiative on Immigration and Immigrant Integration seeks to support innovative research on the effects of race, citizenship, legal status and politics, political culture and public policy on outcomes for immigrants and for the native-born of different racial and ethnic groups and generations. This initiative falls under RSF's Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration Program and represents a special area of interest within the core program, which continues to encourage proposals on a broader set of issues.

The Foundation is especially interested in novel uses of under-utilized data and the development of new methods for analyzing these data. Proposals to conduct laboratory or field experiments, in-depth qualitative interviews, and ethnographies are also encouraged. Smaller projects might include exploratory fieldwork, a pilot study, or the analysis of existing data. RSF encourages methodological variety and inter-disciplinary collaboration.  Proposals for comparative, cross-national work will be considered only if they have strong implications for U.S.-centered issues.
rss_bioss
OSP review not required for letter of inquiry
Sponsor Letter of Inquiry Deadline: May 24, 2018
Award Amount: Up to $150,000
 
This initiative will support innovative social science research on social and economic outcomes that improves our understanding of the interactive mechanisms by which environmental influences affect biological mechanisms, and vice versa. This includes research that: (1) estimates how the structured nature of the social environment and intra- and intergenerational social inequalities affect biological processes, (2) identifies which indicators of biological processes interact with the social environment to affect different life domains and how, and (3) yields new conceptual frameworks that holistically characterize the complex relationships among biological, psychological and environmental factors to predict a range of behavioral and social outcomes. The foundation is primarily interested in research that explores and improves our understanding of social and economic predictors and outcomes.  

rsf_css 
OSP review not required for letters of inquiry
Sponsor Letter of Inquiry Deadline: May 24, 2018
Award Amount: Up to $150,000

The Russell Sage Foundation's initiative on Computational Social Science (CSS) supports innovative social science research that brings new data and methods to bear on questions of interest in its core programs in Behavioral Economics, Future of Work, Race, Ethnicity and Immigration, and Social Inequality. Limited consideration will be given to questions that pertain to core methodologies, such as causal inference and innovations in data collection. 
ghs
Harvard OSP Deadline: May 16, 2018
Sponsor Deadline: May 9, 2018
Award Amount: Limit not specified. Applicants may request costs for personnel, travel, materials and/or other costs.

The special programme "Islam, the Modern Nation State and Transnational Movements" is aimed at researchers who, with an eye to current developments, are examining the emergence of political movements in the Islamic world at the national and/or transnational level. Historical studies are encouraged and supported, together with projects in the areas of religious, cultural or political science. Proposals will be supported that address the particularities and contexts of cultural and historical environments and relationships. The projects' deliverables should be able to make a contribution to diverse and expert discussions in public and political circles.
wtgrant
OSP review not required for letters of inquiry
Sponsor Letter of Inquiry Deadline: May 2, 2018
Award Amount: $100,000 to $600,000 over 2-3 years for reducing inequality research grants; $100,000 to $1,000,000 over 2-4 years for improving the use of research evidence grants 

The W.T. Grant Foundation is focused on youth ages 5 to 25 in the United States, funding research that increases our understanding of:
  • programs, policies, and practices that reduce inequality in youth outcomes, and
  • strategies to improve the use of research evidence in ways that beneit youth. 
The foundation seeks research that builds stronger theory and empirical evidence in these two areas and informs change. While it is not expected that any one study will create that change, the research should contribute to a body of useful knowledge to improve the lives of young people.
searle
Harvard OSP Deadline: April 9, 2018
Sponsor Deadline: April 16, 2018
Award Amount: Recent grants have ranged from $20,000 to $1,000,000, with the majority of grants under $100,000

The Searle Freedom Trust fosters research and education on public policy issues that affect individual freedom and economic liberty. Through its grant-making, the foundation seeks to develop solutions to the country's most important and challenging domestic policy issues.  The foundation invests primarily in scholarship that results in the publication of books, journal articles, and policy papers. Funding is typically provided in the form of research grants, fellowships, and other types of targeted project support. The Searle Freedom Trust also provides funding for public interest litigation and supports outreach to the public through a variety of forums, including sponsorship of research conferences and seminars, film and journalism projects, and new media initiatives.
ibm
OSP review not required
Sponsor Deadline: April 2, 2018
Award Amount: $20,000 stipend 
 
The aim of the IBM Center for the Business of Government is to tap into the best minds in academe and the nonprofit sector who can use rigorous public management research and analytic techniques to help public sector executives and managers improve the effectiveness of government. The  Center is looking for very practical findings and actionable recommendations - not just theory or concepts - in order to assist executives and managers to more effectively respond to mission and management challenges.  Individuals receiving a stipend should produce a 10,000- to 12,000-word report written for government leaders and public managers, providing very practical knowledge and insight. 
clir 
Harvard OSP Deadline: March 27, 2018
Sponsor Initial Proposal Deadline: April 3, 2018
Award Amount: $50,000-$250,000 for single institution applications; $50,000-$500,000 for multi-institution applications
 
The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) is now accepting applications to support digitizing collections of rare and unique content in collecting institutions.  The Digitizing Hidden Collections program coheres around six core values:
  • Scholarship: The program is designed to maximize its impact on the creation and dissemination of new knowledge.
  • Comprehensiveness: The program supports digitization projects that will provide thorough coverage of an important topic or topics of high interest to scholars, in ways that help those scholars understand digitized sources' provenance and context.
  • Connectedness: The program supports projects that make digitized sources easily discoverable and accessible alongside related materials, including materials held by other collecting institutions as well as those held within the home institution.
  • Collaboration: The program promotes strategic partnerships rather than duplication of capacity and effort.
  • Sustainability: The program promotes best practices for ensuring the long-term availability and discoverability of digital files created through digitization.
  • Openness: The program ensures that digitized content will be made available to the public as easily and completely as possible, given ethical and legal constraints.
CLIR will hold a webinar for prospective applicants on Tuesday, January 30, 2018 from 2:00-3:00 pm Eastern Time. Two Q&A webinars will be held on Thursday, February 15, and Wednesday, February 28, from 2:00-3:00 pm Eastern time. 

More information, including webinar links, frequently asked questions, and sample proposals, is available at https://www.clir.org/hiddencollections/applicant-resources/
furthermore
Harvard OSP Deadline: February 22, 2018
Sponsor Deadline: March 1, 2018
Award Amount: Up to $15,000

Furthermore grants assist nonfiction books having to do with art, architecture, and design; cultural history, the city, and related public issues; and conservation and preservation. The fund looks for work that appeals to an informed general audience, gives evidence of high standards in editing, design, and production, and promises a reasonable shelf life.  Funds apply to such specific publication components as writing, research, editing, indexing, design, illustration, photography, and printing and binding.  Book projects to which a university press, nonprofit or trade publisher is already committed and for which there is a feasible distribution plan are usually preferred.  
mellon
Harvard Pre-Proposal Deadline: February 12, 2018 by 8:00am
Harvard OSP Deadline for Full Proposal (if nominated): March 23, 2018
Sponsor Deadline for Full Proposal: March 30, 2018
Award Amount: Up to $225,000  

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has invited Harvard University to submit one proposal in consideration of the 2018 Sawyer Seminar opportunity. The Sawyer Seminars are a vehicle to bring together faculty, foreign visitors, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students from a variety of fields mainly, but not exclusively, in the arts, humanities and interpretive social sciences, for intensive study of subjects chosen by the participants. This program aims to engage productive scholars in multi-disciplinary and comparative inquiry that would (in ordinary university circumstances) be difficult to pursue, while at the same time avoiding the institutionalization of such work in new centers, departments, or programs.
 
Sawyer Seminar awards provide support for one postdoctoral fellow to be recruited through a national (or international) competition, and for the dissertation research of two graduate students. It is expected that the graduate students will be active participants in the intellectual life of the seminars. The seminars' contributions to graduate education in the humanities and social sciences will be carefully considered even though they are not intended to be organized as official credit-bearing courses.
 
Harvard is limited to submitting one proposal in consideration of this opportunity. Prospective applicants are asked to submit an internal pre-proposal here by February 12, 2018.
Federal Funding Opportunities
neh_public_scholar
OSP review not required
Sponsor Deadline: February 7, 2018
Award Amount: $4,200 per full-time month. The maximum stipend is $50,400 for a twelve-month period.

The Public Scholar Program supports well-researched books in the humanities intended to reach a broad readership. Although humanities scholarship can be specialized, the humanities also strive to engage broad audiences in exploring subjects of general interest. They seek to deepen our understanding of the human condition as well as current conditions and contemporary problems. The Public Scholar Program aims to encourage scholarship that will be of broad interest and have lasting impact. Such scholarship might present a narrative history, tell the stories of important individuals, analyze significant texts, provide a synthesis of ideas, revive interest in a neglected subject, or examine the latest thinking on a topic. 

otherfederal

Agency for International Development (USAID)
Department of State
National Institutes of Health


National Endowment for the Humanities
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For assistance, please contact:
Erin Hale
Senior Research Development Officer
erin_hale@fas.harvard.edu | 617-496-5252
 
To see previous Social Science Funding Newsletters, please visit our email archive.

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