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  "path": "/2026/04/15/who-wins-fellowships-in-the-arts-humanities/",
  "publishedAt": "2026-04-15T16:24:52.000Z",
  "site": "https://dailynous.com",
  "tags": [
    "Awards Grants Honors",
    "Data",
    "awards",
    "data",
    "grants",
    "hierarchy",
    "merit",
    "networks",
    "Who Wins Fellowships in the Arts & Humanities?",
    "Daily Nous"
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  "textContent": "“Unfortunately, the types of people for whom such fellowships might represent the greatest departure from their everyday experience—and whose career trajectories might be most dramatically shifted given freedom from their usual constraints—are infrequently their beneficiaries.” In an article at Public Books, Dominique J. Baker (University of Delaware) and Christopher T. Bennett (RTI International) share their research on nearly 30,000 fellowships awarded by six fellowship programs to which any individual in the arts, humanities, or social sciences can apply, including Guggenheim Fellowships, National Humanities Center Fellowships, and others. These fellowships generally provide time and funding for work as well as “extensive opportunities for networking and collaboration.” The authors write: Sociological research suggests that it is the people who already have considerable money, status, or both that are more likely to win grants, fellowships, and awards, especially more prestigious honors that enhance the cultural cachet of recipients. This tendency exists due to the ways that social networks, cumulative advantages, and access to greater resources play a role in the preparation of the application, recommender solicitation, and ultimate selection process. Among their findings: Winners of one of these fellowships are more likely to be winners of one of the others. The vast majority of these fellowship recipients have been based at a US college or university. The five most common university affiliations for grant recipients over the past 100 years have been Harvard, UC Berkeley, Columbia, Stanford, and Yale. They write: The fact that these institutional affiliations remain so dominant suggests that a series of decisions, preferences, and resource constraints tend to favor applicants with higher-status affiliations. One contributing factor, of course, is the likely prospect that the people who apply to these fellowships disproportionately work at high-status, well-resourced universities. People who work at better-resourced universities may also very well have different track records precisely because they have more support routinely available to them (some get a portion of an assistant’s time, others get funds for students to help conduct research, etc.). For instance, universities with a substantial number of winners often have structures for sharing winning materials and established processes for reviewing each applicant’s draft application materials, streamlining the pathway to a fellowship for those at well-connected universities. Further, several institutions—such as Columbia, Notre Dame, the University of California–Los Angeles,..\n\nThe post Who Wins Fellowships in the Arts & Humanities? first appeared on Daily Nous.",
  "title": "Who Wins Fellowships in the Arts & Humanities?"
}