Workshop Application Guide:

Graduate students wishing to apply for the workshop should prepare the following in a single pdf document. Please title your file "LAST NAME--2023 Grad Student Workshop." Submit the final, compiled pdf document through this form (below). 

1. Cover Sheet: Your full name, institutional affiliation, contact information (email and surface mail address).

2. Description of stage you, as a student, has reached in your program

3. Enumerate your research experiences to date.

4. Provide an overview of your dissertation. (The overview should summarize the topic, including chronological and geographic parameters, collections of original sources already consulted, and all research institutions that you, as the student, has visited or will visit while pursuing the dissertation.)

Applications for the workshop are due Friday, September 23, 2023. Send all questions about the application or workshop to Peter J. Blodgett at pblodgett1794@gmail.com

Workshop Details

Today’s graduate students in western history confront an increasing array of unyielding obstacles in launching their careers. Each year, they must scramble to keep up with the accelerating pace of changes in everything from the descriptive tools created by libraries and archives to the proliferation of digital resources generated by cultural institutions. Moreover, given the shrinking pool of dollars for projects in the humanities, graduate students face a steadily more ferocious competition for fellowships, research awards and grants in general.  Believing as we do that the graduate student community represents an essential dimension of western history’s future, we have developed the following workshop in collaboration with the WHA as a means of helping to meet what we see as particularly crucial needs for the next generation of scholars.

Workshop Schedule
This workshop will run from 1:30 PM until 4:00 PM on Thursday, October 26 and will consist of two sessions, preceded by a fifteen-minute introduction and incorporating one 15-minute break. The sessions will address the following topics:

• Introduction:  overview of workshop goals (15 minutes).

• Session #1:  Fellowships, research awards and grant seeking in general (30 minutes).

• 15-minute break

• Session #2:  Plotting out the research project:  individual/small-group conversations about the dissertations being pursued by the workshop attendees (90 minutes).