wenner gren dissertation grant

March 15, 2022

Wenner-Gren Foundation Dissertation Fieldwork Grants

Application Deadline: May 1, 2022

• For doctoral dissertation or thesis research in anthropology
• Maximum award of $20,000
• Open to students of any nationality

Dissertation Fieldwork Grants are awarded to aid doctoral or thesis research. The program contributes to the Foundation’s overall mission to support basic research in anthropology and to ensure that the discipline continues to be a source of vibrant and significant work that furthers our understanding of humanity’s cultural and biological origins, development, and variation. The Foundation supports research that demonstrates a clear link to anthropological theory and debates, and promises to make a solid contribution to advancing these ideas. There is no preference for any methodology, research location, or subfield. The Foundation particularly welcomes proposals that employ a comparative perspective, can generate innovative approaches or ideas, and/or integrate two or more subfields.

There is no time limit on the duration of the grant, and funding may be requested to cover distinct research phases (for example, two summers,) if this is part of the research design.

For complete information about this opportunity, including how to apply, click here .

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Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research – Dissertation Fieldwork Grants

Dissertation Fieldwork Grants  are awarded to aid doctoral or thesis research. The program contributes to the Foundation’s overall mission to support basic research in anthropology and to ensure that the discipline continues to be a source of vibrant and significant work that furthers our understanding of humanity’s cultural and biological origins, development, and variation. The Foundation supports research that demonstrates a clear link to anthropological theory and debates, and promises to make a solid contribution to advancing these ideas. There is no preference for any methodology, research location, or subfield. The Foundation particularly welcomes proposals that employ a comparative perspective, can generate innovative approaches or ideas, and/or integrate two or more subfields.

No fixed duration of the grant.

Up to $20,000.

• Applicants must be currently enrolled for a doctoral degree.
• Application must be made jointly with a dissertation supervisor or other scholar who will undertake responsibility for supervising the project.
• Qualified doctoral students are eligible without regard to nationality or institutional or departmental affiliation.
• Grant funds cannot be released unless the applicant has successfully completed all requirements for the doctoral degree other than the dissertation/thesis. Applications may be submitted before the completion of such requirements; however, all requirements other than the dissertation/thesis must be completed before the start date for the research given by the applicant on the application form. If the application is successful, the Foundation will request confirmation that this requirement has been met.
• Dissertation Fieldwork applications that were unsuccessful in a prior funding cycle may be resubmitted only if they are accompanied by a resubmission statement, explaining how the application is different from the prior application and how the referees’ comments have been addressed.
• If a Dissertation Fieldwork grant is awarded, the applicant and supervisor must agree to comply with the  Requirements and Conditions of the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant.
• Applicants who already hold a doctorate irrespective of field are not eligible to apply for a Dissertation Fieldwork Grant leading to a second doctorate.

Wenner-Gren Foundation [email protected]

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Wenner-Gren Dissertation Fieldwork Grants

Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research

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Wenner-Gren Foundation

The Wenner-Gren Foundation has formed a partnership with the Center for Digital Antiquity to offer a resource for prospective applicants and others interested in the work we’ve funded. The Wenner-Gren Collection contains successful grant proposals from our various programs. Our grantees have generously contributed these documents to assist other scholars. Some also contributed earlier iterations of their applications so you can track improvements to their work. Please do not cite any of these proposals without the author’s permission.

There are two ways to search within this collection. You can use the large search field on the banner above (directly below our name). You can also consult the child collections, listed on the righthand panel, which contain grant applications grouped by type. The collection in its entirety is listed below.

More information about our grants and fellowships and instructions on how to apply for them can be found here https://wennergren.org/ . The Center for Digital Antiquity is an organization dedicated to preserving and making accessible digital cultural heritage. This mission is fulfilled through the use of tDAR, the Digital Archaeological Record, a digital repository run by the Center for Digital Antiquity that preserves and makes accessible archaeological and cultural heritage in an easy to use web-based platform. tDAR has other collections that you may find helpful. Please use the following keywords or the small search field on the upper right corner of this page to search the repository as a whole.

Other Keywords Socio-Cultural • Dissertation Fieldwork Grant • Post-PhD Research Grant • Archaeology • Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship • Physical-Biological • Gender • Wadsworth Fellowship • Race • Politics

Culture Keywords Ancestral Puebloan

Investigation Types Ethnographic Research • Methodology, Theory, or Synthesis • Archaeological Overview • Ethnohistoric Research • Historic Background Research • Collections Research • Environment Research • Consultation • Data Recovery / Excavation • Bioarchaeological Research

Temporal Keywords Late Holocene • Late Intermediate Period • Middle Horizon • Early medieval • Medieval • Classic Period • Iron Age • Bronze Age • Historical Period • Pre-Contact Period

Geographic Keywords United States and Canada • North America (Continent) • Africa (Continent) • Asia (Continent) • South America • United States of America (Country) • Europe • Middle East • Southeast Asia • South America (Continent)

Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-73 of 73)

• Documents (73)

This resource is an application for the Conference Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. The World Archaeological Congress (WAC) is a non-governmental, not-for-profit organization whose members seek to promote interest in the past in all countries, to encourage the development of regionally-based histories and to foster international academic interaction. Its aims are based on the need to recognize the historical and social roles as well as the political context of archaeology, and the need...

This resource is an application for the Post PhD Research Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. What does it mean to fight for environmental futures through the language and practice of care and collaboration? Which ways of interacting with the environment are valorized and cultivated, and who or what gains power? In the US state of Alaska, new livelihoods are increasingly prominent in rural regions, as historically dominant forms of state- and industry-driven resource extraction are joined...

This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. This project will carry out the first archaeological analysis of socio-natural landscapes in the Sandawe homeland of central Tanzania. This project will generate a basic corpus of data for the last 2,000 years of the region, including material culture inventories and chronologies, settlement patterns, and evidence of vegetation and environmental change. Traditionally, scholarship has cast the...

This resource is an application for the Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Cash transfer programs are significant, world-making responses to global poverty, made all the more necessary in the time of Covid-19. There has been surprising consensus ? among Silicon Valley techies, World Bank bureaucrats, and lefty academics ? that cash transfers can right the wrongs of top-heavy and inappropriate development interventions by "just giving money to the poor." Cash...

This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. This dissertation research studied the emergence of Indian doctors, engineers, and designers forming startups to create novel medical devices, or "medtech." As biomedical devices produced through "Silicon Valley" inspired business models are being increasingly used to manage and monitor health, and the current Indian administration shifts the burden of "hacking" public health burdens onto...

This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. This research project examines transformations in the relationship between race and biopolitics in Sitka, Alaska, focusing on infectious disease outbreaks over the past 200 years. Specifically, I interrogate the intersection of whiteness and infectious disease and suggest that the politicized concept of whiteness has shifted dramatically. I hypothesize that: 1) over the course of Russian and...

This resource is an application for the Post PhD Research Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. The remains of fossil animals represent an abundant dataset by which to address a variety of important questions relating to human evolution, including the ecological conditions in which our hominin ancestors evolved. However, because of the multitude of processes that modify or even remove remains from the fossil record, analytical techniques that utilize them cannot assume that the once living...

This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation.

This resource is an application for the Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. In Career Arcs: Identity, Oppression, and Diversity in Archaeology, I present an intersectional, qualitative study of how racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, and ableism shape the demographics of archaeology, and the knowledge that archaeologists produce. I examine the personal narratives of over seventy diverse archaeologists, with whom I conducted in-depth, semi-structured interviews. I...

This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. The Indian state of Uttar Pradesh (UP) is one of the most dangerous places in the world for children. If it were a country, UP would have the sixteenth highest child mortality rate in the world. Child health outcomes have remained poor despite efforts by national and international agencies to improve access to medical services in the state. This project examines ways in which caregivers...

This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. As transgender and gender-nonconforming identities become more visible in medicine, policy, and the media, gender affirming medical care is increasingly seen as acceptable and necessary. Yet while childhood gender has long been the subject of clinical research, the impact of specialized medical care on young people and their families is poorly understood. Given the racialized and class-based...

This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. In Chennai, and elsewhere, sand is a constitutive element of modern urban life. Through its many material arrangements and circulations, sand mediates lifeworlds and landscapes. For example, in Chennai, sand mined or dredged from riverbanks, beaches, and the Bay of Bengal flows into the city, where it supplies the "raw" material required for urbanization. Much of this sand becomes concrete,...

This resource is an application for the Post PhD Research Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. This project investigated how Classic Maya individuals understood the objects that archaeologists characterize as 'artifacts,' and applied this Maya material perspective to modern archaeological practices in order to transform how we interpret excavations at Classic Maya sites. To accomplish this, the project focused on three activities: reconstructing elements of a Classic Maya perspective on the...

This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. This ethnographic project investigates the role that artisanal objects and ornamentation play in the constitution of gendered daily practices and ways of life in Oaxaca de Juárez (Mexico). Hand-made textile production is at the center of the social life of several rural Mexican communities. In this plural cultural context, servilletas are ordinary and richly adorned pieces produced by women...

This resource is an application for the Post PhD Research Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Crisis mortality, a dramatic but temporary increase in mortality rate above the baseline level resulting from a single extraordinary factor, was an important phenomenon in past human populations and continues to affect living people in ways that might be preventable. One of the most important mortality crises in history was the Black Death; in Europe alone, the epidemic killed tens of millions of...

This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Tangier Island is a small, incorporated town, just over one square mile, of 470 inhabitants in the Chesapeake Bay, belonging to Accomack County, in the Commonwealth of Virginia, USA. Its residents are densely related watermen and their families--mostly white, lower income, politically conservative, Christian, and skeptical of science and climate change. Endogamous marriage is preferred,...

This resource is an application for the Post PhD Research Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Since 2011, the United States has classified an increasing number of migrants as 'criminal aliens' for the purposes of deportation. Recent studies have illustrated this policy's social toll: chronic insecurity among migrants, suffering among families torn apart, and alienation among those sent to an unfamiliar 'homeland' and as 'criminals' (e.g., Boehm 2016;Coutin 2016;Golash-Boza 2015;Khosravi...

This resource is an application for the Post PhD Research Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Migrations are an intrinsic aspect of human societies, past and present. This global character can be used to build a comparative anthropological framework seeking to understand the drivers and consequences of migration. Within this agenda, we seek to comprehend what are the causes and social effects of a rapid migration pulse recorded between AD 1270-1420 in the southern Andes (Uspallata Valley,...

This resource is an application for the Post PhD Research Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. The coarse and dispersed information on the western-most Iberia does not allow a detailed understanding of the human behavior ecology and ecodynamics during the Pleistocene. That problem can only be solved with an innovative project focusing a region rich in multiple resources that is an ecotone between different landscapes and where can be found sites with long sequences and good preservation of...

This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Liberal capitalist nation-states find themselves in perpetual crisis due to the structural contradictions of democratic ideals and the enduring social inequalities and violences of race. Neoliberal techniques of governance address these crises by cultivating new modes of personal responsibility and value through state-sanctioned projects of 'caring' for marginalized populations, forming new...

This resource is an application for the Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. The Hunt Fellowship will support the completion of a book manuscript 'Enveloped Lives: Caring and Giving in Lithuanian Health Care.' This book is an ethnography of how people practice health and care by engaging in ambiguous practices that some would define as informal and corrupt. It examines the relationship between caring, things and money. It focuses on how informal payments -- 'little...

This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. This project looks to emerging political practices surrounding the politics of memory for recent Eritrean refugees in Bologna, Italy. Since the mid-2000's Eritrea's young have been leaving in droves, in numbers as high as 2,000 to 7,000 people monthly. Traversing one of the deadliest migrant trails in the world, Eritreans constitute the second largest refugee group entering the EU by boat. I...

This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. This dissertation explores the ethical self-cultivation of black Muslim youth in Philadelphia. Anthropologist Saba Mahmood describes ethical self-cultivation as a "specific sets of procedures, techniques, and exercises through which highly specific ethical-moral subjects come to be formed" (Mahmood, 2005, p.120). I consider this process as well as how it becomes racialized and gendered in the...

This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. This project proposes a legal historical ethnography of the liberal legal institution of parole as a site to explore the assimilation of colonial subjectivities into post-apartheid governance and social relations. It poses the question of how the institution mediates between the universalist liberal aspirations of law, and continued racial oppression and hierarchy in post-apartheid South...

This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. More than ever, the problem of cultural borders is a prominent theme in political and social debates around the world. The perception of culture as an object has effects on the emergent cultural conservation and restoration policies, as well as generating disputes concerning their authenticity and origin. Contributing to this debate, this research project explores the question of "culture...

This resource is an application for the Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. My book, The Fragility of Sense: Language, Ethics, and Understanding in Deaf Nepal, draws on 23 months of fieldwork to explore what it means to live in a world where language cannot be taken for granted. In Nepal, roughly 5000 deaf persons - those involved in deaf schools and organizations - learn Nepali Sign Language (NSL). Most deaf persons, however, use "natural sign," an NSL term that...

This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Two species from different domestication centres – the Bactrian camel from central Asia and the Dromedary from Arabia – were deliberately brought together and bred to create new, more powerful, animals. Larger than both parents and double the strength of its contributory species, the hybrid camel was the world’s first engineered hybrid transportation. Creating the hybrid camel required...

This resource is an application for the Post PhD Research Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes verus) living in a savanna environment at Fongoli, Senegal are the only known mammalian population besides humans that hunt with tools. Chimpanzees here use modified stick tools ('spears') to hunt nocturnal prosimians (Galago senegalensis) as they nest in tree cavities during the day. Additionally, females hunt significantly more than expected with tools, while males...

This resource is an application for the Post PhD Research Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. This project examines the detention and deportation of South American migrants from the United States, with a focus on the largely understudied migrant populations from Ecuador and Peru. In contrast to studies of deportation that focuses mostly on the period of detention and the return itself, this project examines deportation as a set of social practices occurring over time and as a transnational...

This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. This proposal investigates people in northeastern Brazil who claim to have "indigenous blood" ("sangue de índio"), but do not classify themselves as Indigenous people. In the southeast of Piauí state (unlike other regions), no parts of the rural population claim Indigenous status or land rights, yet many people refer to their "indigenous blood." Preliminary data suggest that this refers to...

This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. The human microbiome -the collection of microorganisms (and their genes) that live in, on, and around us- represents an interface through which contact with the environment impacts human biology. More specifically, contact with the social environment shapes host microbial communities, which in turn influence host physiology and immune system development. Despite these important connections,...

This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. This project will investigate the socio-economic foundations of oasis communities during the Early Bronze Age (EBA, ca. 3100BCE - 2000BCE) in southeastern Arabia. These relatively small-scale communities demonstrate strategic organizational and subsistence choices in extreme environments and climates that led to the establishment of widespread oasis agriculture communities across the...

This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. This project set out to understand how the paradigm of 'humanized birth' is implemented in Salvador, Brazil, through Rede Cegonha, a government program to improve maternal and infant healthcare in Brazil's public health system. Over the course of twelve-months of multi-sited ethnographic research, the project followed Rede Cegonha from the federal Ministry of Health to the local health...

This resource is an application for the Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. "Intimate Institutions: Psychiatry, Family, and the Rise of Biopolitical Paternalism in Contemporary China" examines families' involvement in the care and management of persons diagnosed with serious mental illnesses in China, especially during the recent mental health legal reform. Over the last three decades, most psychiatric inpatients in China have been hospitalized against their will, by...

This resource is an application for the Post PhD Research Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Human behavior is characterized by the motivation to seek out new knowledge, often leading to discoveries or innovations. Already as infants, we are curious about the world around us. Paradoxically, scientific work on curiosity in non-human animals is surprisingly rare and we know remarkably little about the origins of curiosity and how the trait is distributed and expressed among non-human...

This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. The ethnographic dissertation research explores the communication and negotiation among Sufis and ulema, and their role in the public sphere and peacebuilding in present-day Afghanistan through the lens of the newly formed Sufi-Islamic council in Herat. The council brings together different Sufi associations (tariqas), local ulema as well as Sufi adherents to respond to the changing religious...

This resource is an application for the Post PhD Research Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. According to predominant norms among Muslims in the Kurdistan region of Iraq, sharia ("Islamic law") empowers a husband to divorce his wife by spoken repudiation. When husbands regret their repudiation, they often visit jurists at local Fatwa Councils seeking advice to restore their marriage. Having squandered the authority granted them by sharia, husbands try to restore that authority through...

This resource is an application for the Post PhD Research Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. This project is grounded in a partnership with the Mississaugas of the Credit First nation to apply community-based archaeology in southern Ontario that focusses on learning about learning. There are two main goal of this project. First, we plan to bring together Indigenous methodologies and archaeological study to teach youths how to learn ancestral pottery making. This involves the integration...

This resource is an application for the Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. This book analyses the politics of memorialization of the struggle for independence in postcolonial southern Africa with special reference to Mozambique. The aim is to scrutinise the different ways in which liberation heritage discourse is used and mobilised to construct a range of socioeconomic and political values in the southern African. The book illustrates how the recent heritagization...

This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. The dead create our social worlds. Their names constitute our sense of place, their images watch over us from monument perches, and their stories build the foundation of our polities and societies. In Algeria, after 50 years of independence, material and linguistic vestiges of the dead of the War of Liberation (1954-1962) continue to exert power over Algerian society, reflecting the enduring...

This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. In the city of Lahore, Pakistan, plots of land are increasingly traded like stocks. Though land has long functioned as inherited wealth or a long-term investment, in recent years it has become liquid, or a good that can be quickly bought and sold as prices change. Across a diasporic market, plots of land circulate between local residents and overseas Pakistan living in the Middle East,...

This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. This project investigates how people marshal the past to secure a sustainable future. I ask how Amerindian people in Amazonia attribute historical and ecological values and meanings to anthropogenic landscapes, while simultaneously building an understanding of themselves within a complex set of changing relations between humans, nonhuman agents, and the environment. I propose an ethnography...

This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. My research examines new configurations of sovereign power in Central America in the context of two momentous transformations currently taking place on the Afro-indigenous Miskitu Coast of Nicaragua. The first of these is the escalating militarization of the coast by the neo-Sandinista regime of Daniel Ortega, allegedly in response to high volumes of cocaine trafficking. The second is the...

This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Initial findings suggest that recent developments in who can speak and what can be said in kabary (Malagasy oratory) show that the form does not, as has been suggested, solely serve to rigidify social hierarchies; it is also a means of reflecting and improving current realities. Nonetheless, a critical component of kabary remains substantiating one's claims by referring to the razana...

This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Anthropologists have long been concerned with the immense variety of collective institutions developed by small-scale societies to foster solidarity, inculcate values, and manage resources. Long-term studies tracking the development and maintenance of such institutions would greatly benefit a range of social science disciplines, but are unfortunately rare. To this end, the proposed project...

This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. This research examines the processes through which the dilemmas of everyday life in exile contribute to the emergence of novel forms of moral community and ethical selfhood among young male refugees with no links to humanitarian NGOs. Specifically, it asks how masculine vocabularies, practices, and aspirations are and are not reconfigured when the violence of war and exile upset gendered...

This resource is an application for the Workshop Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. The aim of the workshop is to provide a forum for discussion among experts in stone artefact archaeology for the Palaeolithic period in East and Southeast Asia in order harmonize our methods and interpretive frameworks. Currently, scholars from several different countries and academic backgrounds work on this subject. The high diversity of current approaches impedes progress on important research questions...

This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. The goal of this project is to examine the relationship between food, identity, and culture contact in the context of imperial borderlands. More specifically, the proposed research uses ancient plant remains to address the role of food in the complex multi-directional social interactions between colonists and indigenous groups in the Wari Empire of the highlands of the Peruvian Andes....

This resource is an application for the Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. How do indigenous practitioners successfully heal? What can we learn from animistic medical traditions? My research has examined these questions through long-term ethnographic fieldwork on the healing practices of the Akha, a group of non-literate swidden farmers living in highland Laos. I documented for the first time in detail the system of Akha healing sacrifices and their shamanic...

This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. This dissertation research investigates if and how Argentine actors are inverting Latina American racial ideologies of mestizaje to 'de-whiten' Argentine identity and produce a mestiza Argentine identity. Specifically, this project analyzes the linguistic and material practices by which Argentine actors construct and perform a mestiza Argentine identity in order to elucidate the potentially...

This resource is an application for the Post PhD Research Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. How do we imagine the ideal state that we aspire to live in? I address this question in anthropological terms through a multi-sited ethnography of state restructuring in Nepal since 2006. In the wake of a decade-long civil conflict between Maoist and state forces in this erstwhile unitary Himalayan kingdom turned secular democratic federal republic of nearly 30 million, I transpose Victor Turner's...

This resource is an application for the Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Despite recent advances in chronometric techniques, the geological ages of many Plio-Pleistocene deposits containing early hominins, particularly those in South Africa, remain in doubt. Consequently, biochronology and relative faunal dating methods remain valuable age-assessment tools, and cercopithecoid monkeys have historically been among the most biochronologically useful faunal elements....

This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. In the fishing town of Dillingham, Alaska, poet Gary Snyder once found the raucous epitome of “the working bars of the world” (1983:91). These days, however, Dillingham’s mood is decidedly dimmer as its workers develop and debate plans to restructure the Bristol Bay salmon industry, which has swung from unprecedented profitability to near insolvency in little over a decade. Although the...

This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. This research examines salvage: its different meanings, the theoretical directions it leads to, and how it contributes to understanding social life in Lebanon -a country that, for some time now, has been described as being on the brink of collapse. Among scientists repurposing microbial samples in laboratories, physicians using salvage therapies in clinics, and political activists constantly...

This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. My project is a study of Kenya's 'war on terror,' examining how security practices and counterterrorism are affecting urban space and state power. In recent years Kenya has experienced a number of terrorist attacks that have profoundly impacted the country, placing security at the center of national politics and transforming the very institutions of state security. Through historic and...

This resource is an application for the Engaged Research Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. This research project broadly explores how Afro-Puerto Ricans in Piñones, Loíza resist structural racism, struggle for social equality, and pursue a more prosperous future. In collaboration with the Corporación Piñones se Integra (COPI), a a community-based non-profit, we will employ ethnographic methods to understand how Afro-Puerto Ricans experience race, practice environmental conversation of...

This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. To answer the question of how exiled Syrians forge their own lifeworlds in Paris, France, this study employs ethnographic methods to explore the unique conception of Syrian-ness that emerges from biographies shaped by the legacy of French colonialism, Syrian nationalism, and the ongoing violence in Syria. While categories such as "refugee," "asylum seeker," and "French citizen of Syrian...

This resource is an application for the Post PhD Research Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Even as unemployment rates fall, contract and freelance work is on the rise, and job tenures are short - the current median tenure is 4.2 years. The changes in work follow a historical shift in how Americans understand the employment contract. Under contemporary capitalism, people increasingly see themselves in business terms: they are the "CEO of me." In this perspective, hiring resembles a...

This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. While environmental governance initiatives, such as climate change mitigation mechanisms, are often framed in scientific and economic terms, they are entangled with diverse processes of socio-environmental change that cross ontological and epistemological borders. This research is an attempt to complicate the stories that are told about environmental governance and develop a narrative...

This resource is an application for the Fejos Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. The Romanian Gypsy population of Cortorari keep to conspicuously arranging their children's marriages despite repeated attempts at national and European level to eradicate the practice. Contrary to folk and policy-makers' representations of Roma marriages as cursory alliances enforced by adults on pubescent children ensuing in premature sexual intercourse, Cortorari experience their...

This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. This project examines the technological reconstitution of privacy in America through an ethnographic study of the efforts of Silicon Valley area corporations to 'save' privacy on the Internet using technology. Such efforts respond to the widespread perception that the reorientations of global business and governance around increasingly cheap, pervasive, and powerful forms of digital...

This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. The question 'Are we alone?' has shifted in the past few decades to 'Where else is life?' Answers to both questions--an intelligent alien and lively signs of earthlike biology--have yet to surface. This dissertation seeks to illuminate how two communities of scientists construct experimental systems around these missing objects, operating at the edges of knowledge, through familiar metaphors...

This resource is an application for the Post PhD Research Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Over the past ten years, the Rwandan government has intensified efforts to extract methane gas from Lake Kivu, a 2500 square kilometer lake that straddles the border of Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The methane extraction project has two stated aims: to reduce dangerous levels of unstable gasses dissolved in the lake and thus prevent it from exploding, and to provide much-needed...

This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. While the fossil record captures many crucial details of our evolutionary past, it does not preserve social behavior. Certain aspects of spatial landscape use, such as dispersal and home range size, have major consequences on social organization. An accurate reconstruction of landscape use by fossil hominins would therefore be an empirical proxy for otherwise-elusive social behaviors....

This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. What can anthropology do to reconcile the ubiquity of generational resilience with the growing science of heritable alterations to the stress response to adversity? Engaging a critical biocultural approach, I investigate the intergenerational embodiment and transmission of trauma in the wake of the Guatemalan genocide. My work is rooted in three generations of indigenous genocide survivors...

This resource is an application for the Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Over the past decade, new bioarchaeological methods such as isotope analysis and ancient DNA have become standard tools for studying migration and mobility. Yet with an increasing amount of data now available, it is apparent that these methods come with significant limitations: each, on its own, rarely able to confidently characterise migration. It is, therefore, crucial to develop new ways...

This resource is an application for the Fejos Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. This is a collective film project based on my field-work in Sierra Leone, amongst polio-disabled people living in self-sustaining communities. Through the story of a young disabled boy, Manish, the film captures how historical time and its macro-political work (war and peacebuilding) shape the micro-realities of individual lives. Manish is a war-survivor and he squats with many of his...

This resource is an application for the Post PhD Research Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Seven years after the guns ceased to thunder in Northern Uganda, and four years after people left the squalid displacement camps to return home to their 'ancestral' lands, clans in rural areas in Acoliland began to create their own non-profit foundations. In doing so, many clans have had to contemplate, debate, and finally write their foundations' constitutions, mobilizing, translating, and...

This resource is an application for the Wadsworth International Fellowship from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. This Wadsworth International Fellowship is to aid training in Anthropology at Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

This resource is an application for the Wadsworth International Fellowship from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. This Wadsworth International Fellowship is to aid training in Anthropology at the University of Sussex, Brighton, United Kingdom.

This resource is an application for the Wadsworth International Fellowship from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. This Wadsworth International Fellowship is to support training in Sociocultural Anthropology at the University of Texas.

This resource is an application for the Wadsworth International Fellowship from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. This Wadsworth International Fellowship is to support training in Urban Anthropology at Concordia University.

This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. This project examines how the destruction of built environments reconfigures economic and environmental inequalities in the postindustrial United States. It does so by investigating the demolition of vacant buildings in Detroit. Estimated to number between 70,000 and 100,000, vacant buildings index decades of racially motivated population decline and deindustrialization. Such structures are...

Wenner-Gren Dissertation Fieldwork Grant for Egbatan

Mine Egbatan , a third year Ph.D. student, has been awarded a Wenner-Gren Dissertation Fieldwork Grant for her research titled “Disabled Women in Turkey: Disability, Gender, and Infrastructure in a Populist Authoritarian State.” Mine would like to thank to her advisors  Drs. Brian Silverstein  and  Eric Plemons  for their guidance throughout her studies and during the grant writing process.

Yale MacMillan Center South Asian Studies

Wenner-Gren Foundation Dissertation Fieldwork Grant

Congratulations to Shivangi Pareek, a fifth-year PhD student in sociocultural anthropology, who has been awarded a Wenner-Gren Foundation Dissertation Fieldwork Grant to support her project titled ” ‘We only paint stories we heard from our ancestors’: Adivasi art in a Contemporary Art-World.” She has been doing research for this project already in Madhya Pradesh and New Delhi, India, and plans to continue fieldwork when it becomes possible to return to field research. 

Congratulations to Tanmoy Sharma, a 4th year PhD student in sociocultural anthropology, who has been awarded a Wenner-Gren Foundation Dissertation Fieldwork Grant to support his project entitled “Contentious Agreements: The Making and Remaking of a Hydrocarbon Regime in India.” He plans fieldwork in northeastern Assam, as well as Guwahati and New Delhi, India, when it becomes possible to return to field research.

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Paige lynh awarded a dissertation fieldwork grant from the wenner-gren foundation for anthropological research, departmental news.

Posted:  May 27, 2024 - 12:00am

Paige Lynch, graduate student in the Evolutionary Anthropology program, has been awarded a Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research .

This grant program funds doctoral or thesis research that advances anthropological knowledge. Our goal is to support vibrant and significant work that furthers our understanding of what it means to be human. There is no preference for any methodology, research location, topic, or subfield. The Foundation particularly welcomes proposals that integrate two or more subfields and pioneer new approaches and ideas.

I propose to investigate the interplay between biology and culture by examining how non-elite people responded biologically during significant sociocultural and climatic change periods. The human skeleton represents one’s biological history, recording lived experiences that reveal an individual’s biocultural response to their environment. A political-economic lens allows for a deeper interpretation of why sociocultural changes impact biology whereas embodiment theory enlightens how the body responds. Traditionally, non-elites are overlooked in historical and archaeological studies, despite comprising most of a population. In line with recent dialogues in anthropology, this research gives agency to historically silenced individuals. This project will use molecular and skeletal analyses of human remains combined with historical documentation to examine how institutional inequality impacts ordinary people. The late Medieval (14-16 th  c.) and post-Medieval (17-18 th  c.) periods in Poland provide an ideal case study because Poland experienced a cultural shift toward a feudal economic social structure. I will investigate how sociocultural factors impact biological responses by evaluating the relationship between sociocultural changes and migration, the effects on diet, and the impacts on early life skeletal manifestations of stress and adult longevity. The results can advance bioarchaeology into current migration conversations to better establish future migration policy.

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Did anyone actually get a wenner-gren dissertation grant this round.

I know this isn't a typical question for this sub but wasn't sure where else to ask. Myself and literally everyone else I knew who applied were all rejected after all making it through to the second round and submitting the COVID edits they asked for. Normally at least one person in my department gets it each year. I am completely fine having been turned down as I ended up with plenty of funding to complete my project anyways without the delay of Wenner Gren this round (ie I got money awarded in the spring allowing me to work in the summer and fall), so this isn't a me being bitter question, its pure curiosity.

I have friends at three different universities who have noticed the same thing (no one in their departments got it) and I know at least one professor who said none of her colleagues she's asked students received it either. Not even the non-monetary awards they said they'd be giving out to worthy applicants whose projects couldn't be done due to COVID. And these are well regarded programs too, with strong histories of regularly getting Wenner-Gren.

My circles are very archaeology centric (although my department is not) so I was wondering if just less of us archaeologists got awards this year due to COVID or just very few people in general.

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Kofi Mensah wins Wenner-Gren Foundation award

David “Kofi” Mensah , a student in Northern Arizona University’s interdisciplinary health doctoral program and a research assistant with Northern Arizona University’s Center for Health Equity Research , won the Wadsworth International Fellowship award through the Wenner-Gren Foundation .

The fellowship provides funds to support Mensah’s living expenses for four years while he is earning his doctoral degree in interdisciplinary health (IH) at NAU.

Mensah, an international student from Ghana, is exploring his research interests in a medical anthropological approach to mental healthcare and drug addiction with a theoretical emphasis on stigma and care through his doctoral degree.

“Kofi has been a great team member on my projects,” said Emery Eaves , associate professor in the NAU Department of Anthropology and one of Mensah’s mentors. “His enthusiasm for improving mental health care and reducing stigma has translated into an interest in substance use treatment. His research in Ghana has the potential to improve mental health care and change the way both health care providers and patients are treated in Ghana’s post-colonial medical system.”

After earning his bachelor’s degree in anthropology from the University of Cape Coast, Ghana, Mensah earned a master’s degree in medical anthropology from NAU before joining the IH doctoral program.

“I had a friend here at NAU doing his master’s degree in criminology, so I decided to apply to the anthropology program here and got in touch with Dr. Michelle Parsons who has been my academic advisor since then,” Mensah said.

Mensah is also a scholar for the Culturally-Centered Addictions Research Training (C-CART)—a training program with fewer than a dozen national and international scholars selected to participate. In fall 2021, Mensah said that he discovered C-CART from a general email to all IH doctoral students, and he decided to apply.

“I got interested because I was working as a graduate research assistant with Dr. Eaves on a project with CHER [Center for Health Equity Research] around telemedicine and opioid use during the pandemic, which led me to develop an interest in drug addiction research,” Mensah said. “I thought of this [C-CART] program as a perfect fit for my career training.”

In the summer of 2021 CHER, in partnership with NAU’s College of Education, received a grant to create C-CART, a graduate training program for practicing clinicians and doctoral students in health professions. C-CART addresses substance use disorders, specifically in underserved American Indian, Hispanic, and rural populations. Regents’ Professor Julie A. Baldwin , CHER director, and Ramona Mellot t, dean of NAU’s College of Education and professor in the Department of Educational Psychology are the multiple principal investigators of the project.

“We are so pleased to have David (Kofi) Mensah as part of our inaugural cohort for the C-CART program,” Mellott said. “Kofi is part of an interprofessional team focused on obtaining research skills that include culturally centered practices, related to substance use disorders which can be applied in interprofessional practice and diverse settings. His focus on medical anthropological research brings a valuable dimension to the team. Congratulations, Kofi, on your recent Wadsworth International Fellowship Award through the Wenner-Gren Foundation and for your commitment to research in mental health care and drug addiction.”

Mensah said his doctoral thesis research focuses on a medical anthropological approach to mental healthcare and drug addiction with a theoretical emphasis on stigma and care.

“During these research projects [with Eaves and CHER], I found that there’s stigma, especially structural stigma, around mental health and drug addiction care and treatment,” he said. “My Ph.D. dissertation seeks to look at the interpersonal and structural stigma processes that hinder mental health care in Ghana through an in-depth hospital ethnography at the Ankaful Psychiatric Hospital.”

Through Mensah’s C-CART research, he is also examining medical treatment strategies for pregnant women with chronic pain syndrome diagnosis in northern Arizona who are enrolled in Medicaid.

“I want to thank my academic advisor and mentor, Dr. Parsons, for her unflinching support throughout my academics here in the United States,” Mensah said. “Also, a thank you to Dr. Emery Eaves for all the opportunities and support she has given me. I am very grateful to them.”

“I also want to acknowledge my Chi Alpha Christian campus ministry family for their support and love,” he added. “And to my Northland Christian Assembly church family, I say thank you for making me feel at home away from home.”

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• Wenner-Gren Foundation

Post-PhD Research Grant

• Doctorates in Anthropology
• Doctorates in Related Fields
• Independent Scholars

This grant program funds individual research projects undertaken by doctorates in anthropology or a closely related field. Our goal is to support vibrant and significant work that furthers our understanding of what it means to be human. There is no preference for any methodology, research location, topic, or subfield. The Foundation particularly welcomes proposals that integrate two or more subfields and pioneer new approaches and ideas.

Award Money

The maximum Post-PhD Research Grant is $25,000. Grants are nonrenewable. There is no limit to the duration of the grant, and applicants may request funding to cover distinct research phases (for example, two summers) if this is part of the research design. Wenner-Gren awards do not include funds to cover institutional overhead or any fees related to the administration of our grants and fellowships.

Application Deadline

Application deadlines are May 1 (for project start dates between January 1 and June 30 of the following year) and November 1 (for project start dates between July 1 and December 31 of the following year). The application portal opens 2 months before the deadline. It takes us 6 months to complete the review process and arrive at a final decision.

Who Can Apply

Qualified scholars of any nationality or institutional affiliation are eligible. Independent scholars and senior scholars are welcome to apply. Individuals who are within 5 months of receiving their doctorate or equivalent degree may apply, but they must complete their degree before the start date listed on their application form.

Most grantees must fulfill all the requirements of their existing award and submit their final report before applying for a new award. But if you have a Conference and Workshop Grant, a Global Initiatives Grant, or a Historical Archives Program grant, you are welcome to apply; if so, please contact us for more information if this situation applies.

Unsuccessful applicants are welcome to reapply. But as part of their resubmission, they must explain how they have addressed the reviewers’ concerns, along with any changes to their plans.

Our reviewers assess the quality of the proposed research, its potential contribution to anthropological knowledge, and its adherence to the principles articulated in our mission, including a commitment to fostering an inclusive vision of anthropology. We expect applicants to draw inspiration from a broad range of scholarship, including relevant work in English and other languages. Please refer to “ Motion of the 32nd RBA: Diversify Information and Education about the Global Anthropologies of Foreign Researchers and Anthropology Students .”

Successful proposals have the following features:

• A well-defined research question
• A detailed description of the evidence that will be sought
• A feasible plan for gathering and analyzing this evidence
• A discussion of the applicant’s qualifications to carry out the research
• A compelling account of the project’s potential to advance anthropological knowledge and transform debates in the field.

Applicants whose research is oriented toward primatology or primate conservation must demonstrate the broader anthropological relevance of their work. The Foundation supports work on language structure and endangered languages, but only when it is grounded in anthropological concerns.

To present your project in the best possible light, please follow all instructions for completing your application. Use all the available space to describe your project. If you have questions, contact us at [email protected] or (+1) 212.683.5000.

The application asks for the following:

• General information about you and your project
• An abstract of your proposed project
• Answers to six questions about your project
• A resubmission statement if we declined a Post-PhD Research Grant application previously
• A detailed Plan A budget (Best-case scenario)
• A detailed Plan B budget (Worst-case scenario)
• A bibliography relevant to your proposed project.

The application also asks you to list the permits and permissions required for the proposed project, with the estimated dates by which you expect to secure them. However, please do not submit these documents with your application. If your application is successful, we will request copies of all relevant materials when we notify you of your award.

Applications must be in English. Applicants must submit all forms and other required materials online. If you don’t have adequate internet access to use our system, please contact us at least 1 week before the deadline and we’ll help arrange an alternative method. The online portal opens for applications 2 months before the application deadline.

Before submitting your application, please refer to the U.S. tax information on our website . Non-U.S. applicants should read the information on visa requirements for non-U.S. citizens present or coming to the U.S. as part of their project.

The Foundation requires successful applicants to comply with all U.S. laws. These include but are not limited to regulations governed by the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), which administers U.S. government sanctions programs and regulations relating to the Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List (SDN List). Please see the OFAC Guidelines page on our website and consult the U.S. Department of the Treasury for more information.

In compliance with OFAC regulations, the Foundation requires special documentation for projects located in Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria, Venezuela, Crimea (including Sevastopol), the Donetsk People’s Republic and Luhansk People’s Republic regions of Ukraine, and Russia. The Foundation does not require this documentation at the application stage, but we must receive it before we can release funds.

Please do not send any other materials beyond what the application requests. Do not send transcripts, letters of reference, manuscripts, publications, photographs, or recordings. We will not use this material in the review process, and we cannot return it to you.