The Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship (DPDF)
The Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship (DPDF) is a strategic fellowship program designed to help graduate students in the humanities and social sciences formulate doctoral dissertation proposals that are intellectually pointed, amenable to completion in a reasonable time frame, and competitive in fellowship competitions.
The program is organized around distinct “research fields,” subdisciplinary and interdisciplinary domains with common intellectual questions and styles of research. Each year, an SSRC Faculty Advisory Committee selects five fields proposed by pairs of research directors who are tenured professors at different doctoral degree-granting programs at U.S. universities. Research directors receive a stipend of $7500. Graduate students in the early phase of their research, generally 2nd and 3rd years, apply to one of five research fields led by the two directors; each group is made up of ten to twelve graduate students. Fellows participate in two workshops, one in the late spring that helps prepare them to undertake predissertation research on their topics; and one in the early fall, designed to help them synthesize their summer research and to draft proposals for dissertation funding. Fellows are eligible to apply for up to $5000 from SSRC to support predissertation research during the summer.
The program is administered by the Social Science Research Council and funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
The Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship (DPDF) is a strategic fellowship program designed to help graduate students in the humanities and social sciences formulate doctoral dissertation proposals that are intellectually pointed, amenable to completion in a reasonable time frame, and competitive in fellowship competitions.
The program is organized around distinct “research fields,” subdisciplinary and interdisciplinary domains with common intellectual questions and styles of research. Each year, an SSRC Faculty Advisory Committee selects five fields proposed by pairs of research directors who are tenured professors at different doctoral degree-granting programs at U.S. universities. Research directors receive a stipend of $7500. Graduate students in the early phase of their research, generally 2nd and 3rd years, apply to one of five research fields led by the two directors; each group is made up of ten to twelve graduate students. Fellows participate in two workshops, one in the late spring that helps prepare them to undertake predissertation research on their topics; and one in the early fall, designed to help them synthesize their summer research and to draft proposals for dissertation funding. Fellows are eligible to apply for up to $5000 from SSRC to support predissertation research during the summer.
The program is administered by the Social Science Research Council and funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
