harvard radcliffe 2026-2027

A fellowship year at Harvard Radcliffe Institute is an opportunity to step away from usual routines and dive deeply into a project.

Radcliffe fellows are exceptional scientists, writers, scholars, public intellectuals, and artists whose work is making a difference in their professional fields and in the larger world. Fellows join a uniquely interdisciplinary and creative community. Radcliffe supports engaged scholarship, where fellows develop new tools and methods, challenge artistic and scholarly conventions, and illuminate our past and our present. We welcome applications from scholars and artists proposing innovative work that confronts pressing social and policy issues and seeking to engage audiences beyond academia.

About the Fellowship Program

The Radcliffe Fellowship Program supports 50 scholars, artists, and public intellectuals who have demonstrated records of achievement in their respective fields and show great promise for future contributions.

Throughout the year, fellows convene regularly to share their work in progress, supporting one another in various intellectual groups and building connections through social events. They benefit from access to Harvard’s libraries and archives, to professional development opportunities, and to Harvard college students through participating in the Radcliffe Research Partnership Program. In this program, students intellectually engage with fellows and their projects by researching sources, reviewing book chapters, discussing new approaches to projects, and more.

Fellowship Program Details

Radcliffe supports engaged scholarship. We welcome applications from scholars and artists proposing innovative work that confronts pressing social and policy issues and seeking to engage audiences beyond academia.

Reflecting Radcliffe’s unique history and institutional legacy, we welcome proposals that focus on women, gender, and society or draw on the Schlesinger Library’s rich collections.

We welcome proposals relevant to the Institute’s multi-year focus areas, which include the following:

• Academic freedom and connecting across difference, especially proposals addressing issues of intellectual diversity, political polarization, peace and conflict, inequality, and other policy issues as they relate to free inquiry at higher education institutions, as well as proposals that constructively challenge disciplinary orthodoxies or advance new and potentially transformative perspectives or approaches.
• Climate change, especially proposals addressing critical questions of impact and equity.

In addition, we welcome proposals in the areas of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics directly impacted by federal research funding cuts.

The fellowship runs from September 2026–May 2027.