Bancroft fellowships and awards

Fellowship offered for academic year 2023-2024. Application deadline is the first Monday in February by 5 p.m.

Eligibility for awards

The Kenneth E. and Dorothy V. Hill Fellowship Fund provides one year-long fellowship to graduate students from any campus of the University of California who are conducting research that would benefit from the use of source materials in The Bancroft Library.  This fellowship is not offered every year. 

The holders of the fellowships, designated as Bancroft Fellows, will conduct their research in The Bancroft Library during the fellowship and must therefore be registered during the academic year at Berkeley or their home campus under the inter-campus exchange program.

Students must be beyond the first year of graduate study; in the past, awards have generally gone to students who have passed their qualifying examinations, have exhausted other forms of support, and are engaged in dissertation research.

The applicant's statement of purpose must describe how the research project will make use of The Bancroft Library's collections.

For applicants

Completed applications must include: statement of purpose, 1000 words or less; official transcripts of all undergraduate and graduate coursework; two letters of recommendation from instructors, and, for summer fellowships, the estimated length of time that the applicant would be in residence. The selection committee will balance all of these factors in determining the recipients of the full year fellowships as well as the summer fellowships.

All awards are made by The Bancroft Library Fellowship Committee. All applications and awards will be made within the framework of existing fellowship programs. The applicant will conduct the research project within one year of notification.

For further instructions on how to apply for a Bancroft Library Study Award, please see How to apply.

2022-2023 academic year
Andrew Klein, Militant Capital: How Oakland Became an Outpost of Empire and Rebellion in the Long Twentieth Century.

2021-2022 academic year
Cycle canceled due to Covid-19.

2019-2020 academic year
Alexander Scott Arroyo, Designing an Ocean: Oceanic Imaginaries of American Empire in the New Arctic.

2017-2018 academic year
Alexandra Havrylyshyn, Free Under the Laws of France: How Enslaved Women and Girls Accessed Justice in Antebellum Louisiana, 1837-1857. 

2016-2017 academic year
John Elrick, Model City: Technologies of Government in the San Francisco Bay Area.

2015-2016 academic year
Nancy Gallman, American Constitutions: Life, Liberty, and Property in Colonial East Florida. 

2014-2015 academic year
Peter Ekman, Suburbs of Last Resort: Order and Ruin on the Edge of San Francisco Bay. 

Simon Abramowitsch, The Production of Multi-Ethnic American Literature in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1966-1996: From the Black Panther Party to the Institutionalization of “Diversity.”

2013-2014 academic year
Adam Romero, The Afterlives of Industrial Byproducts: The Necessity of Industrial Byproducts in the Industrialization of California Agriculture. 

Emily Cole, Translation Ideology in Graeco-Roman Egypt (ca. 332 BCE – 300 CE).

2012-2013 academic year
Adrianne Francisco, Colonial Subjects: American Colonial Education and Philippine Nation-Making, 1900-1934.  

2011-2012 academic year
Diana Negrín, Changing Wixárika Lives and Livelihoods in Mexico’s Cities. 

Israel Pastrana, Brazos de Oro: Mexican Contract Labor Migration and the Political Economy of the American Southwest, 1917-1973.

2010-2011 academic year
Tara McDowell, Jess and the Language of Pictures, 1951-1991. 

Hannah Haynie, The Linguistic Geography of the Sierra Nevada and Central California. 

2009-2010 academic year
Colin Dingler, Lyric Impurity: Genre, Serial Poems, and the Form of History in Mid-Century and Contemporary American Poetry. 

Sarah Lopez, Migrating Mexico: A Material History of Remittance Space in Sur de Jalisco and Los Angeles.

2008-2009 academic year
Audrey Wu Clark, The Asian American Avant-Garde: Internationalist Aspirations in Early Asian American Literature, 1882-1945.

William Wagner, Reading, Writing, and Rambling: The Literary Culture of Travel in Antebellum America. 

2007-2008 academic year
Seth Roger Lunine, Private City, Public Threat: Entertainment, Industry and Illusion in Emeryville, California, 1880-1950. 

Maria Belen Bistue, Collaborative Writing: Translation Strategies in Early Modern Multilingual Texts.

2006-2007 academic year
Sean Burns, Working Class Hero: The Intellectual and Activist Legacy of Archie Green. 

Natale Zappia, The Autonomous Interior: Trading, Raiding, and Freedom in Native California, 1700-1857. 

2005-2006 academic year
Ruben Flores, States of Culture: The Central Government and Ethnoracial Consolidation in Mexico and the US, 1920-1950.

Francisco Casique, Race and Space in San Francisco’s Mission District. 

2004-2005 academic year

Rachel A. Chico, Navigating Nation: Communication and Orientation in the Veracruz-Mexico City Corridor, 1812-1867.

Anil K. Mukerjee, An Examination of the Engel Sluiter Historical Documents Collection. 

Hellen Lee, Never Done: Women’s Work and Culture in the United States, 1870-1910. 

2003-2004 academic year
Kimberly Bird, Unsettled Frontier: Poetic Radicalism and the Question of Nationalism in California, 1930-1940. 

Lisa Conathan, Language Contact and Linguistic Change in Northern California. 

Karen McNeill, Building the California Women’s Movement: Architecture, Space and Gender in the Life and Work of Julia Morgan. 

2002-2003 academic year
Yu-fang Cho, Visions of Pacific Destiny: Culture of Western Expansionism and American Women’s Work of Benevolence, 1880s-1900s.

Dulcinea Michelle Lara, Historical Evolution of Education and Its Detrimental Ideological and Identity Forming Consequences in New Mexico. 

Jeffrey Alan Ow, Contested Isles: The History and Representation of Ellis Island and Angel Island.

2001-2002 academic year
Isabel Breskin, Above the City upon a Hill: Lithographic City Views of San Francisco, 1848-1914. 

Andrew Johnson, Quicksilver Mining Landscapes of California and the West, 1840-1920. 
Adrienne Williams, UCB 92 and the Re-Vision of Miracles of the Virgin. 

2000-2001 academic year
Donald Michael Bottoms, Race, Politics, and the Law in 19th Century California.

Anne Burnett Keary, Christian Missionaries, Colonial Knowledges, Contested Geographies: The Missionary Translation of Indigenous Language and Culture in New South Wales and Oregon Territory in the Nineteenth Century.
 

Fellowship not offered this academic year.

Eligibility for awards

The Edward F. and Marianne E. Meylan Fellowship Fund provides one year-long fellowship to graduate students from any recognized institution of higher education in the United States or abroad who are conducting research that would benefit from the use of source materials in The Bancroft Library.  This fellowship is not offered every year. 

The holders of the fellowships, designated as Bancroft Fellows, will conduct their research in The Bancroft Library during the fellowship and must therefore be registered during the academic year at Berkeley or their home campus under the inter-campus exchange program.

Students must be beyond the first year of graduate study; in the past, awards have generally gone to students who have passed their qualifying examinations, have exhausted other forms of support, and are engaged in dissertation research.

The applicant's statement of purpose must describe how the research project will make use of The Bancroft Library's collections.

For applicants

Completed applications must include: statement of purpose, 1000 words or less; official transcripts of all undergraduate and graduate coursework; two letters of recommendation from instructors, and, for summer fellowships, the estimated length of time that the applicant would be in residence. The selection committee will balance all of these factors in determining the recipients of the full year fellowships as well as the summer fellowships.

All awards are made by The Bancroft Library Fellowship Committee. All applications and awards will be made within the framework of existing fellowship programs. The applicant will conduct the research project within one year of notification.

For further instructions on how to apply for a Bancroft Library Study Award, please see How to apply.

2022-2023 academic year
Ian Halter, Worlds for Sale, Peoples for Purchase: Living Alaska’s Cession, 1862-1896. 

2021-2022
Cycle canceled due to Covid-19. 

2020-2021 academic year
Maria Barreiros Almeida-Reis, Backwaters of the Atlantic World: Slavery, Governance, and the Scramble for the Amazonian Borderlands, 1580-1700.

2018-2019 academic year
Amrit Deol, Ghadri and Sikh Poetry: Interrogations of Subjugated Knowledges in History.
 

Application deadline is the first Monday in February by 5 p.m.

Eligibility for awards

The Friends of The Bancroft Library award $45,000 in fellowships for summer study to graduate students from any University of California campus in the form of stipends in a range of amounts.

The holders of the fellowships, designated as Bancroft Fellows, will conduct their research in The Bancroft Library during the fellowship and must therefore be registered during the academic year at Berkeley or their home campus under the inter-campus exchange program.

Students must be beyond the first year of graduate study; in the past, awards have generally gone to students who have passed their qualifying examinations, have exhausted other forms of support, and are engaged in dissertation research.

The applicant's statement of purpose must describe how the research project will make use of The Bancroft Library's collections.

How to apply

Completed applications must include: statement of purpose, 1000 words or less; official transcripts of all undergraduate and graduate coursework; two letters of recommendation from instructors, and, for summer fellowships, the estimated length of time that the applicant would be in residence. The selection committee will balance all of these factors in determining the recipients of the full year fellowships as well as the summer fellowships.

All awards are made by The Bancroft Library Fellowship Committee. All applications and awards will be made within the framework of existing fellowship programs. The applicant will conduct the research project within one year of notification.

For further instructions on how to apply for a Bancroft Library Study Award, please see How to apply.

2023 summer

Niall Chithelen, Concrete and the Construction of China: The Environmental History of "Building Socialism, 1946-1976.

Emily Schollenberger, Shifting Sediments: Photography, Memory, and Imperial Landscapes.
 

2022 summer
Cameron Black, Playing a Different Game: Student-Athlete Protest at the University of California, Berkeley. 

Alexander Chaparro-Silva, Writing the Other America: Democracy, Race, and Print Culture in the Americas, 1821-1898. 

Katherine Hobbs, Romance, Politics, and the Law in British Women’s Rights Reform, 1830-1900.

Caroline Johnston, The Sagebrush Rebellion and the Making of the Right: Political Synthesis in the Rocky Mountain West, 1976-1984. 

Patrick Reilly, Scholars and Social Control: The Politics of American Police Research in the Twentieth Century. 

Jonathan van Harmelen, Legislating Injustice: Congress and the Wartime Incarceration of Japanese Americans. 

2019 summer
Juan Pablo Morales Garza, Politics, Religious Hierarchy and Land Property in Indigenous Villages in the Valley of Mexico, 1853-1862. 

Anthony Joshua Meyer, Attending to the Sacred: Tlamacazque and Their Complex Roles in Mexica and Christian Spaces. 

Alice Regina Lapoint, Spiritual Forces Compel [Miwok and Tlingit Beliefs].

Alessia Cecchet, Monarch: The Last California Grizzly Bear.

Sarah Elizabeth Biscarra Dilley, Where are You From and Where are You Going?: Patterns, Parcels, and Place.

Nitoshia Lashawn Ford, A Consideration of Presence: Black Women LIS Professionals and the Historical Record. 

Janice Yu, Strange Selves: Representations of the Othered Body. 

2018 summer
Carrie Alexander, Rush: Time, Haste, and Negotiations of Power in Mid-Nineteenth Century California. 

Sarah Bane, Join the Club: Regional Print Clubs in America During the Interwar Period. 

Kristina Borrman, The Architecture of Belonging: ‘Livable Places’ in California since 1945. 

Sarah Quincy, ‘Loans for the Little Fellow’: Credit, Crisis, and Recovery in the Great Depression. 

Michelle Ripplinger, Chaucer’s Women from Script to Print: John Stow’s and Thomas Speght’s Collected Works. 

Andrew Shaler, Mariposa: Violence, Colonial and Indigenous Histories of the California Gold Rush. 

Claire Urbanski, (Re)Emergent Bones and Sacred Formations: The Accumulation of Ohlone Remains in the Construction of the San Francisco Bay Area. 

Desirée Valadares, Race, Rights and Reparations: The Material Culture of World War II Confinement Camps in Canada and the United States. 

Tara Keegan, The Endurance of the Upriver People: A Karuk Story of Sport and Survival, 1877-1928. 

2017 summer 
Christina Bush, Fashioning the Black Masculine.

Kelly Easterday, Uniting a Century of Forest Survey Collection to Determine Drivers of Change in California Forests.

Kimberly Killion, From Farms to Kitchens to the “Body Laboratory”: Nutritional Science and the Politics of Food in the United States, 1885-1930. 

Savannah Kilner, Pride and Property: Queer Settler Colonialism and the Landed Politics of Solidarity in Oakland, CA, 1979-present. 

Christopher Miller, Public Enemies: Transience and Lyric in American Poetry. 

Carlos Rivas, Urban Utopia? The Reducción General de los Indios and Coloniality of Space at Nahuizalco, El Salvador after 1520. 

Joanne Tien, Educating for Freedom: A study of the Berkeley Experimental Schools Project, 1968-1976. 

2016 summer
Xan Chacko, Moving, Making, Saving: Experimental Agriculture in California. 

Nancy Gallman, American Constitutions: Life, Liberty, and Property in Colonial East Florida. 

Theodora Dryer, Designing Certainty: A History of Model Based Thinking in the Era of Scientific Planning, 1929-1970. 

Maggie Elmore, Building Community through Politics: The Catholic Church, the State, and Ethnic Mexicans in the US Southwest, 1923-1986. 

Gary Fox, Aesthetic Futures, On Air: Donald Appleyard, Kenneth Craik, and Berkeley’s Environmental Simulation Laboratory.

Camilo Lund-Montano, Out of Order: Radical Lawyers and Revolutionary Movements in the Global Sixties.

Amani Morrison, Black Chicago through the Pen of Gwendolyn Brooks.

Alexander Werth, Culture Wars: Race, Citizenship, and Violence in Oakland, California’s Urban/Colonial Frontier.

2015 summer
Spencer Strub, Robert Doughtie and the Readers of the Print Piers Plowman. 

Jennifer Terry, Shifting Conceptions of Juvenile Labor and Employment in California, 1938-1980. 

Jessica Stair, Textual-Pictorial Literacies in the Techialoyan Manuscripts of New Spain.

Cori Knudten, Constructing Gender in California’s East Bay, 1920-1941. 

Dexter Hough-Snee, Mining Anxiety while Mocking the Marketplace: Economic Thought in the Latin American Satirical Archive, 1598-1880. 

2014 summer
Natalie Mendoza, Domesticating Foreign Policy: Inter-Americanism and Mexican Americans in the US Southwest, 1930s-1950s. 

Jeffrey Yamashita, Manufacturing Japanese American War Heroes: Incarceration, a “Suicide Battalion,” and Ben Kuroki.

Elizabeth Miller, The American Expeditionary Tradition, Pre-Colombian Architectures and the Indigenous Specter in American Art since 1960. 

Robert Lee, Louisiana Purchases: The US-Indian Treaty System in the Missouri River Valley.

Katherine Kadue, “The Living Labours of Publick Men”: Intellectual Labor as Domestic Practice from Erasmus to Milton. 

Daniel Benjamin, Excavating Excluded Affects in the Poems of Jack Spicer. 

Griselda Jarquin, The Transnational Politics of Remembering: Revolution and Counterrevolution in Nicaragua and the US. 

Yve Chavez, Indigenous Agency and Artistic Production at California’s Missions. 

Ziza Delgado, The Third World Liberation Front at UC Berkeley: An Anti-Hegemonic Movement for Radical Pedagogy and Revolutionary Curriculum. 

2013 summer
Robert Kett, Stones, Feathers, Crude: Art and Science in Twentieth Century Southern Mexico. 

Terence Przeklasa, The Mission Indian Federation: American Indian Rights on the Right. 

Susan Wood, Gathering the “Other”: Salvage Ethnography and the Construction of Culture in Southern California, 1897-1909. 

Marilola Perez, Pacific Exceptionalism? A Sociolinguistic Examination of Cavite Chabacano. 

Amy Lee, Coolies and Opium: Comparative Anglo-American Empires, Chinese Globalism, and Literary Modes of Uneven Development.

Samia Rahimtoola, Open Form: The Ethos of the Given in Robert Duncan's Life-Work.

2012 summer 
Marcel Brousseau, Imaginary Lines: Data, Narration, Cartography, and the Speculation and Historicization of the U.S. Mexican Indigenous American Borderlands.

Kevin Whalen, Beyond School Walls: Indian Education in Southern California.

Alicia Cowart, Natural and Anthropogenic Influences on Fire Regimes and Vegetation Change in Central California.

Di Hu, The Transformation of Identity, Daily Life and Resistance in the Colonial Obraje of Pomacocha, Vilcashuaman, Peru.

Sara Jensen, The Topography of Wellness: Mechanisms, Models and Metrics of Health in the Urban Landscape.

Jacob Lee, Imaginary Empires: Kinship, Power and Alliance in the Illinois Country, 1550-1840.

Alexander Tarr, Have Your City and Eat It Too: Los Angeles and the Renaissance in Urban Agriculture.

Travis Wilds, Assembling the Science of the Future: Epistemic Virtues in the Exact Sciences, Physiology and Literature of Post-Enlightenment France, 1780-1840.

2011 summer
Javier Arbona, Racialized Homefronts: Reclaiming the Port Chicago Explosion.

Erin Collins, Recombinant Social(ist) Antagonist on the Landscape of the Lower Mekong Delta.

Emily Colbert Cairns, The Other Carvajal: Reading Crypto-Jewish Feminine Space.

Anita Huizar-Hernández, Histories of Contact: Arizona's Multi-Ethnic Heritage.

Bianca Brigidi, Being Native American: Race, Ethnicity and Mission in Spanish, Mexican and U.S. California, 1769-1852.

JoAnna Wall, Virgin Territory: Women in the Monjeríos of Alta and Baja California, 1697-1834.

Elizabeth Sine, Movements on the Margins: An Archaeology of Struggles for Survival and Dignity in Depression-Era California.

Leece Lee, Modernity and the "Death Ethic": Western Expansion as War in the Northern Plains, 1820-1880.

María Covadonga Lamar Prieto, Spanish Language in XIX California.

2010 summer
Natalia Cecire, The Girl Modest Witness and the Poetics of Knowledge.

Funie Hsu, Blackboard Frontiers: American Expansion and U.S. Colonial Education Policy, 1887-1914.

Diana Greenwold, Skins and Carcasses: Stereoscopic Vision and the Native American in Nineteenth-Century Utah.

Nicole Pacino, Prescription for a Nation: Public Health in Post-Revolutionary Bolivia.

Swati Rana, Who You Calling Immigrant?: Alienage and Nativity in the Literature of Brown America, 1900-1965.

Clare Robinson, The California Memorial Union.

Barbara Zimbalist, The Devil in Disguise: Incarnational Politics in Medieval Miracles of the Virgin.

2009 summer
Kathleen Adams, Kindergarten and Community: The Silver Street Kindergarten Society of San Francisco.

Rachel Brahinsky, The End of Gentrification: Development, Politics and Race in San Francisco.

Allison Ferrell, Collaborated Lives: Individualism and Collectivity in the Avant-Garde of Jay DeFeo.

Cheryl Holzmeyer, Toward Interactivity: Transformations of the U.S. Science Museum Field, 1830-Present.

Adam Lewis, Liberal Citizenship and National Sovereignty in the Antebellum Empire.

Rebecca Munson, "The Text Is Foolish": The Telling Choices of Shakespeare’s First Editions.

Marques Redd, Imaginal Mapping, Psychospirituality, and the Multidimensional Complexities of British and American Romanticism.

Lauren Chase Smith, Bawdy Amusements of Progress in the Transpacific Borderlands.

Christina Zanfagna, Holy Hip Hop in the City of Angels.

2007 summer
Ricardo Fagoaga Henandez, Regions, Markets and Indigenous Economic Participation: Chiapas and Guatemala.

Brian Grossman, Investigating the Influence of Social Science Measurement on the Development of the Disability Rights/Independent Movement.

Heidi Hoechst, Refusable Pasts: Spatial Economics and the Politics of the U.S. Tradition.

Christine Hong, Captivity in Translation: Huckleberry Finn as Intertext in Ralph Ellison's and Ôe Kenzaburo's Mid-century Prisoner-of-War Narratives.

Andrea King, Forbidden Pleasures, Damnable Sin, and Municipal Corruption: Race, Gender, and Respectability in San Francisco’s Vice District, 1900-1940.

Emily Moore, Aesthetic Confrontations: Chilkat Tunics and the Evolution of Northwest Coast Designs.

Joseph Ring, Transported by the Mode: Milton's Sublime Aesthetics and the Politics of Astonishment.

Citlali Sosa-Riddell, The Culture of Commemoration among the Californios: Changing Cultural Practices, Honor, and Race Ideology, 1850-1900.

Warren Wood, City Fathers: The Influence of Social and Economic Changes on the Meaning and Practice of Fatherhood in San Francisco, 1849-1915.

2006 summer
Peter Allen, A Space for Living: Regionalism and the Rise of Environmental Planning in the Bay Area, 1939-1969. 

Amy Lippert, Consuming Identities: Visual Culture and Celebrity in Nineteenth-century San Francisco. 

Timothy Pepper, Economic and Social Interaction in the Papyri from Ptolemaic Tebtunis. 

Maria Ramnath, Haj to Utopia: Anti-systemic Ideologies in the South Asian Diaspora, 1905-1930. 

Lilia Soto, Migration as a Matter of Time: Perspectives from Mexican Immigrant Girls in the Napa Valley. 

Sarah Thomas, The Politics of Growth: Land-Use in Postwar America, 1950-1975. 

Zeb Tortorici, The Appearance of Colonial Order: Sexuality in Colonial Mexico, 1600-1800. 

Richard Welker, The Roots of Agribusiness.

2004 summer
Penelope Anderson, The Rhetoric and Politics of Audience: Lucy Hutchinson, John Milton, and Katherine Philips. 

Steven Fountain, Big Dogs and Scorched Streams: Horses, Beavers, and Ethnocultural Change, 1769-1849. 

Jean V. Gier, Writing Communities and Constituencies: Literature of the U.S. Filipino Press During the Early Twentieth Century. 

Ki Won Han, The Rise of Oceanography in the United States, 1900-1940. 

Stacy Kozakavich, The Archaeology of the Kaweah Co-operative Commonwealth’s Advance Townsite. 

Michael Kunichika, Vision for Verbal Art in the Russian Symbolist Journal, 1899-1917.

Marissa López, Nationalism, Narrative, and History: The Formal Case for Chicana/o Literature. 

Elisabeth O’Connell, Recontextualizing the Tebtunis Papyri. 

Julie Tanaka, German Fiat: German Historiography and Identity in the Holy Roman Empire. 

2003 summer
Nicole Caso, Practicing Memory in Central American Literature: Reflections on Histories, Space and Language.

Alison Fraunhar, Revisioning the Mulata in Cuban Visual Culture, 1880-1980.

Haden Guest, The Police Procedural Film and the Organization of Postwar America, 1930-1960. 

Joyce Mao, China-town: Cultural Politics and Racial Space in San Francisco, 1850-1980. 

Nadia Nurhussein, Verbal Topiary Work: Reading Dialect in American Poetry, 1870-2001.

Jose Pastrano, Immigration Policies and Low-cost Labor: The 1920s Political Debates over Mexican Labor. 

Evelyn Rodriguez, Coming of Age: Identities and Transformations in Filipina Debutantes and Mexican Quinceañeras. 

2002 summer
Samantha Holtkamp Gervase, Life and Law in the Lower Mississippi River Valley: Categories and the Expansion of America, 1800-1860. 

Rudy Poscallo Guevarra, On Common Ground: Mexican and Filipinos in San Diego Agriculture, 1920-1965. 

Chantelle Nicole Warner, Literacy Identity Construction in Works of Dutch Clandestine Literature Written During the Second World War. 

2001 summer
Jessica Delgado, The Inquisition and Women’s Voices: Female Accusers and Witnesses in the Mexican Inquisition.

Yolanda James, California Malinches in the Project to Recover a Chicana/o Lit. Heritage.

Delberto Ruiz, Teki Lenguas del Yollotzin (Cut Tongues from the Heart). 

Anna More, Colonial Baroque: Siguenza y Góngora and the Politics of 17th-Century New Spain. 

Michelle Morton, Utopian and Dystopian Visions of California in the Literary Imagination. 

Anna Naruta, Creating Whiteness in California: An Examination of White and Chinese Relations from 1865-1910.

Suzette Spencer, Sounding Freedom: Maroonist Poetics, Signifyin’ Language, and the Black Vernacular. 

Allison Varzally, Ethnic Crossings in California, 1930-1950

Application deadline is the first Monday in February by 5 p.m.

Eligibility for awards

The Gunther Barth Fellowship, established in memory of Gunther Barth, Professor of History, supports projects at The Bancroft Library by formally enrolled college and university students, regardless of academic degree sought.

Such projects will generally be in the area of nineteenth-century history of the North American West, with preference given to areas of special interest to Professor Barth: the environment, exploration, immigrants, urban history, cultural landscapes, and built environments (such as city or memorial parks).

Size of awards

This fellowship is offered for short term research projects. Awards may be used to defray travel expenses, living expenses, or research costs.

For applicants

All awards are made by The Bancroft Library Fellowship Committee. All applications and awards will be made within the framework of existing fellowship programs. The applicant will conduct the research project within one year of notification.

For more details on applying for the Gunther Barth Fellowship, please see How to apply.

2023-2024 academic year

Mary Ludwig, Incarcerated Nations: Removal and Confinement on Indigenous Lands.

David Morales, Power Plays: A Cultural History of Conquest and Performance in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, 1820s-1870s.

Sarah Sears, Negotiating Nature: Diplomacy, Community, and Environment in the U.S. Mexico Borderlands.

2022-2023 academic year

Francisco Céntola, An Environmental History of the Transportation Revolution, 1850-1910. 

Hope McCaffrey, Free-State White Women in Antebellum Democratic Politics. 

Brian Wright, Conquest on Paper: Archives and the American West.

2021-2022 academic year

Cycle cancelled due to Covid-19

2020-2021 academic year

Laura Gómez, Farmworkers’ Labor Camps: Race, Gender and the Family in California’s Central Valley, 1880-1940

Cooper Weissman, Invasive Bodies, Natural Borders: Eugenics, Conservation and Eco-nativism in the U.S. 1918-1988

2019-2020 academic year

Yoav Hamdani, Uncle Sma's Slaves: Slavery in the United States Regular Army, 1797-1865

Lorraine Dias Herbon, "Give 'em Jessie": The Life of Jessie Benton Frémont

Mark Jordan Keagle, Cold Commodities: Ice and the Building of the American West, 1848-1945

2018-2019 academic year

Charnan Williams, Slavery and Freedom in the City of Angels: Black and Indian Angelenos from the Mexican Period to the United States Civil War, 1820–1865

2017-2018 academic year

William Cowan, The Pacific Slope Megaflood of 1861-1862

2016-2017 academic year

Richard Soash, Tempered Inclusion: Syrian-Lebanese and Armenian Mobility in the U.S. Progressive Era

2015-2016 academic year

John Suval, Dangerous Ground: Squatters, Statesmen, and the Rupture of American Democracy, 1830–1860

Laura Fravel, Gazing Westward: The Quest for Unity in American Art Displays at the World's Fairs, 1876–1916

2014-2015 academic year

Darren Raspa, Pacific Policeways: Grassroots Control and Power in San Francisco, 1850-1950

2013-2014 academic year

Travis Ross, Machines of Memory: Hubert Howe Bancroft's History Company and the Making of Western History

2012-2013 academic year

Daniel Lynch, The Lost Cause of the Californio: Southern and Californio Convergence in Southern California, 1846-1920

2011-2012 academic year

Michael Caires, Greenbacks in the Golden State: California, Legal Tender and the State Resistance during the Civil War

2010-2011 academic year

Christina Salerno, Fire: Not a Natural Disaster

Mackenzie Moore, Our Hearts Are Unalienated from the Land of Our Birth: Isolation and the Americanization of Oregon, 1834-1859

2009-2010 academic year

Alexander Olson, Scars and Signs: Natural History at the University of California, 1869-1906

2008-2009 academic year

Richard Welker, The Culture of Agrarian Capitalism: Farmers, Neighbors, and Economic Relationships in Nineteenth Century California

Application deadline is the first Monday in February by 5 p.m.

Eligibility for awards

Prizes are open to undergraduates currently enrolled at UC Berkeley. Kenneth E. Hill and Albert Shumate established the prizes to encourage Berkeley students to collect books, to build their own libraries, to appreciate the special qualities of the printed word, and to read for pleasure and education.

The Hill-Shumate Prize awards $1,500 to the winning entry and $1,000 for second place. In addition, all entrants will receive one-year gift memberships in the Friends of The Bancroft Library.

To be considered for the Hill-Shumate Prizes, collections must include at least 50 items. Collections may:

• Cover specific authors or subjects, contemporary or historical
• Stress bibliographical features (edition, illustrations, binding, etc.)
• Include paperbacks and ephemeral material, as long as they significantly reflect the purposes of the collection

Modern textbooks should not be submitted.

Judges will give special consideration to how well the collection reflects the student's stated goals and interests. Age, rarity, or monetary value of material in the collections submitted is less important than the thought, creativity, and persistence demonstrated in defining a collection and bringing it into being.

For applicants

The statement of purpose section of your Hill-Shumate Book Collecting Prize application should include:

A brief essay of up to 1,000 words describing:  

• The nature and character of the collection
• How and why it was assembled 
• When it was begun 
• Its significance
• The future direction(s) the collection may take.

An informal list of the items in the collection, citing:

• Author
• Title
• Place and date of publication
• Type of binding
• Condition
• Optional annotations on the importance of individual pieces.

After reviewing the essays and lists, the judges may ask finalists to bring selected items from their collections to The Bancroft Library for final judging.

For further instructions regarding how to apply for The Hill-Shumate Book Collecting Prize, and to download the application form referenced above, please see the How to apply section of this page.

2022

First Place: Lily Garcia, The Bookworm’s Trail to the Wilderness: A Literary Collection. 

Second Place: Patricia Iley, Americana: A Library of American Narratives. 

2021

Cycle cancelled due to Covid-19

2020

First Place: Nicole Su-Wen Lee, A Library of Dragons: Friend not Foe

Second Place: Geraint R. H. Hughes, Historical Fiction from Alexander to Napoleon

2019

Ian Stevens Erickson, Geometry: The Diagram and The Description

2017

Henry Weikel, Visual Legacy of Late 20th Century Science Fiction

2016

Elise Levin-Guracar, Education in America: Policy, Practice, Theory, and History

2015

Samuel Diener, Down to the Sea in Ships:Voyage Narratives and the Epistemic Power of Fictionality

2014

No award granted

2013

First Place: Reginald James, Oakland, California: The Epicenter of the Black Radical Imagination

Second Place: Rebecca Peters, Water, Rights, and the Spirit of Resistance in Latin America

Third Place: Hunam Rostomyan, A Logico-Philosophical Collection

2012

Luciano Concheiro, Becoming Mexican: A Collection

2011

Kathleen O'Connell, Library of Books in Warfare: Military History and Fiction

2010

Anthony James Wright, Traditions of the University of California: Yearbooks

2009

First Place: Kathleen O'Connell, Library of Books in Myths, Legends, and Fantasy

Second Place: Candace Cunard, Science Fiction Through the Years: A Critical/Historical Collection

Third Place: Steven Broderick, Classical Latin and Greek Literature

2008

Rhae Lynn Barnes, The Print Culture of American Amateur Minstrelsy, Blackface Plays, and Dialect in Black Literature (circa 1890s-1940s)

2007

First Place: Sudev Jay Sheth, Library of Books in Northern Indian Classical Vocal and Percussion Music

Second Place: Ashley Fiutko, Library of Books in Ancient Egypt

Third Place: Christopher Montes, Library of Books in Modern American Military History

2006

First Place: Alexis Ashot, Library of Books in Russian Published in the 20th Century

Second Place: Gustavo Buenrostro, Encountering Mexico: History, Politics, and Culture

Third Place: Matt Werner, Jorge Luis Borges and the McSweeney's School

2005

No award granted

2004

First Place: Raul Diaz, Evolutionary Biology and Herpetology

Second Place: Billy Chen, Feminist and Queer Cultural Studies and Psychoanalysis

Third Place: David Singer, Jewish Religion and History

2003

First Place: Danielle Peterson, The Poet, John Ashbery

Second Place: Anobel Odisho, Ancient Near Eastern Archaeology

Third Place: Mai Der Vang, Hmong Culture

2002

No award granted

2001

First Place: David Weinrich, Classics

Second Place: Ken Chen, Modern Poetry

2000

Sean Nye, Scottish Literature

1999

First Place: Lyubov Golburt, Poetry

Second Place: Carolyn Babauta, Beat Poets

Third Place: Christina Tran, World Literature

Application deadline is the first Monday in February by 5 p.m.

Eligibility for awards

The program will support original research relating to the depth and breadth of the Jewish experience in California from 1848, the beginning of the Gold Rush era to 1915, the opening of the Pan Pacific Exposition in San Francisco, with preference for the relation to the California Gold rush experience. The research must include investigation of the original and related secondary materials of the Bancroft Library

Robert E. Levinson, PhD, was an historian and pioneer scholar in the study of the Jewish experience in the California Gold Rush. His doctoral thesis, The Jews in the California Gold Rush, University of Oregon, 1968, and subsequent book of the same title, published by the Judah L. Magnes Museum, Berkeley, 1978, opened an exciting chapter for researchers to examine the complexity, diversity, and impact of the Jewish experience in early California history.

The Robert E. Levinson Fellowship for the study of the history of Jews in California has been established by the Commission for the Preservation of Pioneer Jewish Cemeteries and Landmarks in the West. This fellowship has been established to encourage the further exploration of primary and related secondary resources to further expand the original research of Dr. Levinson.

Size of awards

The fellowship is offered in the amount of $1000. Awards may be used to defray travel expenses, living expenses or research costs.

For applicants

Please see the How to apply section of this page for further instructions.

On the application form, applicants should describe the purpose and scope of the proposed project, detailing sufficient information about relevant holdings of the Bancroft Library that would support the project. Indication of qualifications of the applicant to undertake the proposed work will help the review committee evaluate the proposal.

All awards are made by the Bancroft Library fellowship committee. No awards are made directly by the donor, The Commission for the Preservation of Pioneer Jewish Cemeteries and Landmarks. The applicant will conduct the research project within one year of the notification. The recipient will be asked to write a report for the Bancroft Library and the Commission for Preservation of Pioneer Jewish Cemeteries and Landmarks on their research.

2019

Michel Sunhae Lee, Contesting the Sabbath: A History of the Weekly Sacred Times in America, 1848–1920

2018

Benjamin Steiner, Ketubot from Early California: Jewish Acculturation in the American West

2017

Lori Harrison-Kahan, The Deghettoization of American Jewish Literature: Pioneering Women Writers in the Progressive Era

Application deadline is the first Monday in February by 5 p.m.

Eligibility for awards

Meyers-Putnam Family Bancroft Library Fellowship established in 2007 celebrates the important role of the University of California, Berkeley in the lives of its family members: Leslie O. Meyers (BS Mechanical Engineering, 1922), Kathryn P. Meyers, Peggy Jane Meyers Putnam (BA Physics, 1948; C.LS 1949), and Malcolm G. Putnam (BA Labor/Industrial Relations, 1953; MBA 1955). Leslie O. Meyers served as Captain of the 1921 Cal baseball team. Jane Meyers Putnam was employed as a UC Berkeley technical reference librarian from 1949 through 1955.

This fellowship supports research at The Bancroft Library by undergraduates currently enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley.

Size of awards

This fellowship is offered in the amount of $1000. Awards may be used to defray travel expenses, living expenses, or research costs.

For applicants

All awards are made by The Bancroft Library Fellowship Committee. All applications and awards will be made within the framework of existing fellowship programs. The applicant will conduct the research project within one year of notification.

To apply for the Meyers-Putnam Family Bancroft Library Fellowship, please see the How to apply section of this page.

2023-2024 academic year

Antonio Cortijo-Rodgers

2022-2023

Gianfranco Gastelo, Colonialism in Peru: Inca Garcilaso de la Vega’s and Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala’s Identities. 

Joseph Lerdal, Laboratory of Intervention: The Pershing Punitive Expedition and the Production of Military Knowledge. 

Maya Luong, Investigating California’s Asian American Women’s Experiences of Sexual Violence and Harassment. 

2021-2022

Cycle cancelled due to Covid-19

2020-2021

Gitika Nalwa, Strange Fruit: Male Racial Identity and the American Wilderness, 1830-1950

2019-2020

Emma Bianco, What are They Doing to your Children? Examining Orange County's Right-Wing War on Progressive Education in the 1960s

Application deadline is the first Monday in February by 5 p.m.

Eligibility for awards

The Arthur J. Quinn Memorial Fellowship was established in memory of Arthur Quinn (1942-1997), Professor of Rhetoric.  These fellowships support research by doctoral candidates (i.e., those who shall have been advanced to candidacy by the time the fellowship is taken up) in the history of California from any recognized institution of higher education in the United States or abroad, with a preference for students carrying out research in The Bancroft Library. Applicants must be enrolled in an accredited university.

Size of awards

This fellowship is offered for short term research projects. Awards may be used to defray travel expenses, living expenses, or research costs.

How to apply

Applicants should indicate the scope and purpose of their proposed projects and how collections at The Bancroft Library will support their research. All awards are made by The Bancroft Library Fellowship Committee. All applications and awards will be made within the framework of existing fellowship programs. The applicant will conduct the research project within one year of notification.

For more details on applying for an Arthur J. Quinn Memorial Fellowship, please see the How to apply section above.

2023-2024 academic year

Cassandra Euphrat Weston, Sexual Dissidence, Jewishness, and Radicalism in the American West, 1900-1930.

Douglas Sangster, Advocates Inside and Outside the Law: Disability Activism in California From 1930-1990.

Margot Yale, From the Left Coast: Artistic Practice on the Edge of the California Federal Art Project.
 

2022-2023 academic year

Paul Burow, Ecologies of Belonging: Settler Colonialism and Environmental Change in Rural Communities of California and Nevada. 

Michelle Donnelly, Impressions of Internment: Amy Kasai’s Prints at the Tule Lake Relocation Center. 

Alexander Jin, Heathen Intimacy: A Sexual History of Chinese Migrants in Turn of the Century California. 
 

2021-2022 academic year

Cycle cancelled due to Covid-19
 

2020-2021 academic year

Nicholas Anderman, Anachronic Ocean: Automation and the Time of Labor in Maritime Shipping

Kyle DeLand, Land Monopoly and the Crisis in California Settler Society 1860-1890: Liberalism, Law and Empire

Kevan Malone, Borderline Sustainability: Urbanization and Environmental Diplomacy at the Tijuana-San Diego Boundary 1919-1999
 

2019-2020 academic year

Grace Morrison Goudiss, California Converts: New Religious Movements and American Politics, 1965-1989

Arang Ha, Free Labor, Free Trade, Free Immigration: The Vision of the Pacific Community After the Civil War

Lauren Paige Hunter, Meals of Change: San Francisco Food Activism in the 1960s and 1970s

Antonina Griecci Woodsum, Fiesta Immemorial: Native and Settler Political Economies in Southern California

Tian Xu, Navigating Worthiness in America: White Attorneys, Chinese Immigrants, and African American Civil War Pensioners, 1873-1910
 

2018-2019 academic year

Ivon Padilla-Rodriguez, Hidden in the Fields: The Racial Politics of Laboring Childhoods in California and the Limits of Reform

Calvin Snyder, The State and the Underworld, Los Angeles, 1919–1973
 

2017-2018 academic year

Richard Elliott, A Nation of Silver and Gold: Comstock Mines, California Finance, and the Business of Making Money in America, 1860-1879

Rosario Vasquez Montano, Tras los pasos de Ethel Duffy Turner: La Mujer que Recuperó su Propia Sombra / In the Footsteps of Ethel Duffy Turner: The Woman Who Recovered her Own Shadow
 

2016-2017 academic year

Julia Lewandoski, Surveying Settler Treaties and Indigenous Land Tenure in North America, 1763-1856

Emilie Raymer, Evolution for the Twentieth Century: Carl Sauer and the Development of Cultural Geography, 1920-1950

2015-2016 academic year

Kevin Waite, The Slave South in the Far West: California, the Pacific, and Postslavery Visions of Empire

Josi Ward, A Place for Our Landless Farmers: Recovery and Reform in the FSA Migratory Labor Camps

2014-2015 academic year

Alanna Hickey, The Forms of National Belonging: Cherokee Poetry in Gold-Rush California

Minyoung Lee, The California Gold Rush, American Empire, and the Transformation of a Pacific World, 1848-1898

Thomas Richards, The Texas Moment: Breakaway Republics and Contested Sovereignty in North America, 1836-1846

2013-2014 academic year

Gregory Rosenthal, Work, Body, and Environment in the Hawaiian Diaspora, 1786-1876

Simone Diender, Expert Power in the Knowledge Economy: Clark Kerr, The University of California, and Private Citizenship in the 1940s-60s

2012-2013 academic year

Jessica Christian, Return to the Mission: Gendered Bonds, Women, and Colonization in San Diego, 1769-1910

2011-2012 academic year

Emmanuelle Perez, Between the United States of Mexico and the United States of America: Californios and Politics, 1821-1879

Application deadline is the first Monday in February by 5 p.m.

Eligibility for awards

The Reese Fellowship in American Bibliography and the History of the Book in the Americas have been established by the William Reese Company to encourage research on material printed in or related to the Americas. The fellowships support qualified individuals at the institutions participating in the fellowship program, regardless of academic degree, who are pursuing research in the areas listed below.

The program will support research relating to print culture in any part of the Western Hemisphere, or any investigation of the history of the book in the Americas. Preference will be given to projects in materials printed prior to 1920. Projects may investigate any printed genre (e.g. books, prints, pamphlets, photographs intended for publication, broadsides). They may be purely bibliographical, or they may address any issues of ownership, readership, or use of printed materials. Support for work in manuscript collections will be limited to projects related to printed materials (e.g. annotations in books, publishers' business archives, etc.). They are not intended to support the editing of an author's papers.

Size of awards

The fellowship is offered in the amount of $2,500, to support a month of study. Awards may be used to defray travel expenses, living expenses, or research costs. It is assumed that the recipient of the award will be in residence for whatever term is set by the awarding institution.

For applicants

To apply for the Reese Fellowship, please see the please see the How to apply section of this page.

Indication of qualification of the applicant to undertake the proposed work will help the review committee evaluate the proposal.

All awards are made by The Bancroft Library Fellowship Committee. No awards are made directly by William Reese Company. All applications and awards will be made within the framework of existing fellowship programs. If applying for a Reese fellowship at more than one institution in one year, this should be clearly stated in the application.

The applicant will conduct the research project within one year of notification. All recipients will be asked to write a brief report on their research for The Bancroft Library and the William Reese Company.

2023-2024 academic year

Jason Dyck, Novenas: Print, Piety, and Patria in Spanish America, 1519-1821.

2022-2023 academic year

Antonio Barrenechea, One Hemisphere, Many Nations: Boltonian Americanism and Literary Historiography.

2021-2022 academic year

Cycle cancelled due to Covid-19

2020-2021 academic year

Rafael Cerpa, Exploring the Sources of the Enlightenment in Hispanic America

2019-2020 academic year

No award granted

2018-2019 academic year

Carla Fumagalli, The Editorial and Paratextual Representation of Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz and Her Work in Her First Editions (1689, 1692, and 1700)

2017-2018 academic year

No award granted

2016-2017 academic year

No award granted

2015-2016 academic yearr

Albert Palacios, Preventing "Heresy": Publishing in Sixteenth-Century Mexico

2014-2015 academic year

Maria Belen Bistue, Multilingual-Translation Practices and Multi-Version Texts Printed in Colonial Spanish America, 1530-1800

2013-2014 academic year

Garrett Morrison, The Place of Print: Publication and the Regional Imagination in the Mining West, 1849-1869

2012-2013 academic year

Bert Emerson, Local Rules: The Alternative Democracies of Mid-19th Century American Fiction

2011-2012 academic year

Benjamin Reed, Devotion to Saint Philip Neri in Colonial Mexico City, 1657-1821

2010-2011 academic year

Christina Cruz Gonzalez, The Published Sermon as Reflection and Extension of Faith and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Queretaro

2009-2010 academic year

Daniel Wasserman, Translating the Words of God: Evangelization and the Politics of Language in the Spanish World, 1524-1700

2008-2009 academic year

Andrina Tran, Resurrecting the Forgotten Cookbook

Application deadline is the first Monday in February by 5 p.m.

Eligibility for awards

Donald Sidney-Fryer is a surviving member of Clark Ashton Smith's literary circle, having been his student at the end of Smith's life. In the realm of scholarship, Sidney-Fryer's bio-bibliography of Clark Ashton Smith, Emperor of Dreams (1976) remains the cornerstone of all Smith studies.

The Donald Sidney-Fryer Fellowship, funded by the Aeroflex Foundation, supports scholarly use of primary source materials at The Bancroft Library related to the works of writers, poets, artists and their community collectively referred to as the West Coast Romantics. Notable members of this group, located in Northern California, include Ambrose Bierce, Jack London, Robinson Jeffers, Mary Austin, George Sterling, Clark Ashton Smith, Nora May French, Henry Lafler, James Marie Hopper, Gelett Burgess, Sinclair Lewis, and Xavier Martinez.

The Fellowship is intended to support qualified researchers regardless of academic degree.

Size of awards

The fellowship is offered in the amount of $2500, to support a month of study. Awards may be used to defray travel expenses, living expenses, or research costs. It is assumed that the recipient of the award will be in residence for whatever term is set by the awarding institution.

For applicants

The Fellowship is intended to support qualified researchers regardless of academic degree. Indication of qualification of the applicant to undertake the proposed work will help the review committee evaluate the proposal. All awards are made by The Bancroft Library Fellowship Committee. All applications and awards will be made within the framework of existing fellowship programs.

The applicant is expected conduct the research project within one year of notification. All recipients will be asked to write a brief report on their research for The Bancroft Library and the Aeroflex Foundation.

To apply for a Donald Sidney-Fryer Fellowship, please see the How to apply section of this page.

2021-2022

Cycle cancelled due to Covid-19

2020-2021

No award given

2019-2020

Erik Russ Davis, Clark Ashton Smith and the California Weird

2018-2019

Ian Fetters, Icy Portents of Doom: Clark Ashton Smith’s Hyperborean Cycle and the Polar Mythos