CIC’s first annual American Graduate Fellowships (AGF) competition received 61 fellowship applications from students, including 37 CIC member schools. The AGF initiative promotes doctoral study in the humanities by talented graduates of small and mid-sized private liberal arts colleges. It is designed to reverse a recent trend of fewer students from smaller institutions enrolling in doctoral programs at the best research universities.

The applications were reviewed by a panel of distinguished humanities scholars. Suzanne Blier, an art historian at Harvard University, spoke for the entire panel when she declared that “All of us were really impressed by the quality of the applications.” They selected a pool of 14 finalists, representing eight different fields of graduate study. Two of the finalists stand to receive substantial fellowship awards of up to $50,000 a year for two years. The awards are contingent, however, upon admission and full-time enrollment in a humanities doctoral program at one of 23 private research universities in the United States, United Kingdom, and Ireland.

The list of finalists was forwarded to the graduate deans of the eligible universities, in time to be a factor in the graduate admissions process. The names of the two American Graduate Fellows and the other 12 finalists will be announced in the next issue of the Independent, once the students have finalized their plans for the fall 2007 academic term.

Dr. Jayashree Shivamoggi, director of external scholarship advising at Rollins College (FL), calls the program “timely and necessary, clearly filling a much needed gap” in support for graduate study. The applicants seemed to agree; as one of them wrote, “your program is a wonderful one, regardless of whether I end up being the beneficiary.”

The American Graduate Fellowships are funded by a generous grant from the Wichita Falls Area Community Foundation (TX). Revised guidelines and application forms for 2007–2008 will be available here on the CIC website on April 15, 2007. The next application deadline is October 15, 2007.