We are very pleased to announce the fourth annual Sidney Mintz Student Fellowships for Field Research. Professor Mintz inaugurated the fund in the fall of 2015, by re-assigning funds from the Annual Mintz Lecture (which was endowed in his honor at his retirement, and ran for 21 years, until 2014). The fund supports fellowships annually, at an amount of approximately $3,000 each, primarily for preliminary summer research or other exploratory phases of graduate projects.

The fellows will be chosen from proposals submitted in March and judged shortly thereafter.

Themes

Professor Mintz’s request was that the fund should prioritize graduate student research that applies his own methods and expands research on themes whose study he has enriched across his entire career. Proposals should be for field research and archival studies on primary sources, with close attention to the language and terminologies used by the people, in order to encourage the linking of anthropological attention to culture with historical materialist scholarship. Proposals may include preliminary field and archival research to strengthen the design of quantitative as well as qualitative studies.

Fellowships encourage, but are not limited to, research on:

• the engagement between anthropology and history,
• the Caribbean and its diaspora, including in USA and locally, in Baltimore.
• inequality and race
• food and food history
• the place of language in social and cultural understanding.

Since Professor Mintz worked on both large-scale historical dynamics (Sweetness and Power) and the local and personal experience of people (Worker in the Cane), the fund could support both macro-international and micro-local level research.

Eligibility

Priority is given to the field research disciplines, including Professor Mintz’s home department of Anthropology, and his field of endeavor in History. Also eligible are graduate students from the other Humanities and Social Sciences within the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, and in environmental sciences (DOGEE) in the Whiting School of Engineering, who plan to use field and archival methods in their research. Eligibility includes those training at both the doctoral and the master’s level. Preference is given to students at early stages of the preparation of their proposals for their master’s theses and doctoral projects. Applicants should prepare their proposals in discussion with their advisers.

Timetable

Here is the 2022 Fellowship schedule:

March 11th, 2022: submission of applications to the panel of readers (Professors Alessandro Angelini ([email protected]), François Furstenberg ([email protected]) and Erica Schoenberger ([email protected]).

• Applications and questions can also be sent to the Administrator of the Department of Anthropology, Lexie Ebert ([email protected])
• Week of March 28th: announcement of results, and feedback from the committee.
• Mid-May through the summer: field research.
• September 2nd: Report due (format to be defined).

Application Guidelines

Includes the following, in one file, sent by e-mail, single-spaced.

1. Abstract. One-paragraph describing:
   1. The topic of proposed research
   2. The phase of the applicant’s Ph.D. or Master’s career, discipline of study, research topic, and faculty supervisor
   3. The location, the method, the dates and total budget for proposed field research.
2. Narrative on overall research plans: One page defining the place of the proposed research in the overall graduate training plan and its place in relation to preparation already undertaken, of whatever kind.
3. Outline of proposed project for Mintz Fellowship: one page on site(s), research aims, and method.
4. Budget and budget justification.
5. CV for the applicant
6. Letter from the applicant’s advisor, submitted separately by the advisor.