Graduate Fellowship

The CDH Graduate Fellowship is a one-semester studio for workshopping research in progress. The program welcomes PhD students into the community of Princeton digital humanities researchers and provides the mentorship and support necessary to begin employing computational and data-driven methods in their work. Over the course of one semester, fellows will articulate research questions and identify goals for small-scale, standalone projects or for components of larger projects (e.g. a dissertation). As a cohort, fellows will explore tools, methods, and best practices that will benefit them throughout their careers. No prior technical skills are required, but a familiarity with the landscape of digital humanities, cultural analytics, media theory, or data science is a plus.

Fellowship Details#

The term of the fellowship is one semester; students may reapply for a second term. Fellows should expect to devote ~3 hours per week to their fellowship activities. The award is $1,000/semester.

The program requires attendance at five 90-minute cohort meetings that provide the opportunity to workshop ideas with peers and receive feedback from staff researchers at the CDH as well as allied campus units like Digital Scholarship (DiScho) and the PUL Makerspace. The meeting format evolves alongside the interests of the group: sometimes there are workshops, or we run through a tutorial, or we discuss a shared line of inquiry that emerges.

Applying to the Graduate Fellowship#

Please read all requirements below before applying.

When you are ready, complete this Google Form:

Apply Now

Applicants to the Graduate Fellowship must be enrolled Princeton Ph.D. students, from any department and at any stage of their graduate career (including DCE). Please note that visiting students are not eligible. Applicants are advised to seek the support of their Director of Graduate Studies in advance of application; upon acceptance to the program, formal DGS approval will be requested.

Your application will include:

1. The completed Google Form, above, where you will be asked to provide your home department, year, advisor’s name, dissertation title or research field, and a photo illustrating your project.
2. Your current CV.
3. A 1-2 page letter of application describing your research, the aspects of DH that most interest you, and the ways you feel your research would benefit from this fellowship.

We typically receive 14 applications and accept 6-7 Fellows.

The strongest applications clearly describe a single deliverable to be completed over the course of the semester: for example, a digital map, the first draft of a dataset, a visualization, or a better sense of entry points into a new tool or method. We also welcome applicants working on the conceptual or political dimensions of contemporary computing infrastructures, including approaches from media theory, STS, critical data studies, environmental humanities, and critical AI.

For those students working with or curating structured data, please provide details like: have the objects / texts already been digitized? Are you manually transcribing them? What categories does your data capture? How many records are there? Who owns the objects, and where are they?

For those students using AI as a research tool: Which platform or model are you using? In what part of the research process is AI augmenting your work? How do you wish it were more useful?

Please note that creating websites or digital exhibits is out of scope for this Fellowship. For general help creating a website, see PUL’s Project Website Support and the options provided by OIT’s Web Development Services (WDS). For info on digital exhibits, please reach out to Princeton University Library’s Digital Scholarship (DiScho) unit.