How to Find a Visiting Fellowship

Ok, for all you academics out there, wondering how to travel during your sabbatical (or maybe just a summer) on someone else's dime, here's my guide for you! It's heavily cribbed off of Jonathan Sterne's advice, which he was always so keen to share. Here's to paying a few of those favours forward...

First off, this is a problem you're probably going to need a spreadsheet to solve. At least, this is my tried and true strategy. 

You'll have a column for links (what's the actually useful website you need to refer to, not the 101 vague descriptions of innovation and strategic plans that the sponsoring institution may have published?), a column for deadlines (essential), one for benefits (is there a stipend? travel assistance? housing?), and one for application requirements (do you just hand in a CV + proposal, or do you need to get someone from within the institution to sponsor you? Are you oblidged to bother your friends for reference letters?). 

Next, do your best to populate that spreadsheet with as many possibilities as you can find. Keyword searches will take you far ('visiting fellowship', 'visiting researcher', 'scholar-in-residence', 'research stay') as will word of mouth (ask colleagues in your field for their recommendations/put out a call on your platform of choice). You'll also likely want to to pay special attention to any institution that describes itself as an 'Institute of Advanced Studies'--both in the USA and in Europe--since these all seem to have robust programs for this kind of thing. It also doesn't hurt to take a peek at the CVs of more senior folks in your field that you really like, and see which halls and programs they've passed through.

With a list in front of you, you'll get a sense of where your efforts are more likely to be rewarded, in whichever ways matter to you. Do you absolutely need finance assistance to make the trip? Do you face an insurmountable wall of networking and nepotism at one institution? Or do you happen to know someone there who owes you a bit of a favour, and now's the time to call it in?

You'll also see that deadlines vary pretty wildly. Some places (those European Institutes of Advanced Study, for one) might want applications in more than year in advance. Others (shorter term, newer programs) may be working closer to 6 or even 4 months out. Because you ideally will be including your fellowship plans in your sabbatical applications to your Dean, you should probably be prepared to line something up about a year out, or at least be able to say that you're applying to x y z fellowships, and expect to be headed in this general direction for this general project, and they should definitely approve your leave for this reason.

Then, the nuts and bolts of the applications: 

Almost invariably, you'll be required to submit a 2-3ish page proposal for what you want to do during your time as a visiting fellow. This is going to look and feel a lot like grant writing, so dust off your favourite grant writing tips and shape a project that is engaging, plausibly do-able, and nods to the particular value of doing it in the given context of the program you're applying to. Maybe it's a question of your project fitting perfectly with a thematic call. Maybe it's about exchanges with local faculty, or access to archives. Or maybe there's a deeply charismatic buzzword topic you're going to add a unique spin to. You've heard all these refrains before. Sing them well. Likely, you'll be able to reuse a lot of material from one application to the other, while still tailoring a paragraph or two to show particular interest and connections to a given program.

You may be asked to submit a proposed budget for spending a fixed sum of fellowship money. This is a good reality check for you, and perhaps even a pleasant opportunity for travel window shopping. If you have contacts working in the institution, they may be able to share previous proposals with budgets you can use to reverse engineer both figures + helpful accommodations leads.

If your application requires a letter from a sponsoring faculty member, it would not be untoward of you to offer to write that letter for them, or at least a first draft therein. 

Since the deadlines and durations of these things are so variable, you're probably going to working your way through your spreadsheet, sending out applications for multiple conflicting opportunities. That's ok. You are guaranteed not to win everything you apply for. 

It's also alright to approach your sabbatical as a multi-leg journey, filling in one piece at a time. For me, I got confirmation of the CAIS fellowship in Germany about 290 days ago (not coincidentally, the length of my current Duolingo streak...). This takes up half of my sabbatical, leaving me with another 3-4 months to fill as I will, potentially lurking around Europe. The Digital Futures fellowship slid nicely into that gap, because the duration is variable and self-chosen, as short as a month. This puzzle piece fit particularly well between the end of my CAIS fellowship, my location in central Europe, and the commitment to fly to Boston exactly one month from then. It also meant that, over the duration of the sabbatical, I'll have 4 months of structure and housing, and 3 months with less determined commitments, which seems like a good split.

Happy hunting!