Handbook for Socio-Cultural PhD Students Introduction Requirements TA/Teaching Fellows Sources of Funding MA Degree & Advanced Standing Advising Advanced Certifying Exams (ACEs) Dissertation Prospectus Grant Writing Fieldwork Dissertation Writing Dissertation Defense

Grant Writing

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Dissertation Funding

You will seek outside funding for your dissertation research project and to this end you will prepare a variety of grant proposals at the beginning of your third year.  The department also will offer an annual grant-writing workshop.   The single internal source is the Columbia Traveling Fellowship, which has a deadline, the first Monday in February.  

A good resource for finding out about funding is the Anthropology Newsletter, published by the American Anthropological Association.  Subscriptions to the newsletter are included in Association membership.  For information call (703) 528-1902, ext. 3031 or visit their website at http://www.aaanet.org/ (under ‘Student Resources’, ‘Grant and Funding Resources’).  See also see the extensive Graduate School of Arts and Sciences list of External Fellowships at:

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/gsas/  - click on fellowship search.

Possibilities include:

Social Science Research Council

Fulbright IIE & Fulbright-Hays DDRA

American Council of Learned Societies

National Science Foundation

Tinker Foundation

Wenner Gren Foundation

International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX)

There are also grant guides in Columbia’s libraries.  A reference librarian can point to them quickly.  Most granting agencies have websites.

See: Graduate Student Resources> Grants & Fellowships

Human Subjects Research Review

An Institutional Review Board at the university now must approve on all funded dissertation research projects involving human subjects.  The aim is to protect such subjects from harm.  The process is cumbersome, technical and unavoidable.  The URL for the IRB on the main campus is: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/irb/

The application site is https://www.rascal.columbia.edu  and the Rascal help line is 212-870-3480

An IRB statement relevant for overseas projects is “International Human Subjects Research:  Interim Guidelines” (March 11, 2003)

Dissertation advisors also are entangled in this approval system as Principal Investigators.  For more information see the website of the American Anthropological Association: http://www.aaanet.org

See the “Statement on Ethnography and Institutional Review Boards” (June 4, 2004)