Stephen A. Schwarzman Building > Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers

Fellowships

Click here to download the application for the 2010-2011 Fellowship year

The application deadline for the 2010-2011 Fellowship competition is Friday, September 25, 2009.

SCOPE

The Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers is an international fellowship program open to people whose work will benefit directly from access to the research collections at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street (formerly the Humanities and Social Sciences Library). Renowned for the extraordinary comprehensiveness of its collections, the Library is one of the world's preeminent resources for study in anthropology, art, geography, history, languages and literature, philosophy, politics, popular culture, psychology, religion, sociology, and sports.

CRITERIA AND TERMS

The Cullman Center’s Selection Committee awards up to 15 fellowships a year to outstanding scholars and writers – academics, independent scholars, journalists, and creative writers. Foreign nationals conversant in English are welcome to apply. Candidates who need to work primarily in The New York Public Library's other research libraries – The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the Science, Industry and Business Library – are not eligible for this fellowship, nor are people seeking funding for research leading directly to a degree.
The Cullman Center looks for top-quality writing from academics as well as from creative writers and independent scholars. It aims to promote dynamic communication about literature and scholarship at the very highest level – within the Center, in public forums throughout the Library, and in the Fellows’ published work.

You walk the corridors of the Library with the acute sensation that what has been bestowed upon you, amongst all these books, is a sense of what matters. You enter a silence that requires humility, grace, and the deepest thanks.
- Colum McCann, novelist. Fellow 2004-2005

A Cullman Center Fellow receives a stipend of up to $60,000, an office, a computer, and full access to the Library's physical and electronic resources. Fellows work at the Center for the duration of the fellowship term, which runs from September through May.
Each Fellow gives a talk over lunch on current work-in-progress to the other Fellows and to a wide range of invited guests, and may be asked to take part in other programs at The New York Public Library.

Though my expectations of the fellowship were extremely high, they have been immeasurably out-done by the pleasure and privilege of being here. The Center provides a blessed and matchless haven for intellectual and creative work.
- Hermione Lee, professor of literature, biographer, and essayist, Oxford University. Mel and Lois Tukman Fellow 2004-2005

I remember thinking what curious people athletes must be to practice whatever it is they do for six to eight hours, seven days a week, for years on end – until it occurred to me that that’s what I do; that’s what we writers do all our lives. Others have no inkling of the twenty-four hours a day, waking or sleeping, in which we are about our true business – scholarship, poetry, our stories. That is what the Cullman Center knows. It doesn’t take us out of reality but gives us, for months on end, a place where we can have our heads to ourselves.
- Lore Segal, fiction writer. Fellow 2008-2009

Novelists, historians, biographers, journalists – we have come together from different fields and found, in a wonderfully convivial atmosphere, common interests. A round-table discussion we arranged on the subject of “unreliable evidence” was so lively and so full of fertile ideas that I thought it was a shame it hadn’t been recorded. My neighbors here have influenced the way I think and write, and I shall miss them unspeakably; if the threads of my subject still seem disparate and loose, we the Fellows at least are firmly sewn together.
- Gaby Wood, journalist. Fellow 2007-2008

THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY/AMERICAN COUNCIL OF LEARNED SOCIETIES FELLOWSHIPS

The Center may give up to five fellowships a year in conjunction with the American Council of Learned Societies. Candidates for joint fellowships must submit separate applications to The New York Public Library and to the American Council of Learned Societies. For information regarding ACLS eligibility requirements and an ACLS application, please visit the ACLS website, www.acls.org/programs/comps.

Not only did I find the Center to be an exceptionally congenial community; it proved to be a remarkable place to work. In nine months I have been able to research and produce a first draft of four long chapters of a six-chapter book. It absolutely could not have been done without the workspace provided and especially the location of that workspace in this extraordinary library.
- Thomas Bender, historian, New York University. Fellow 2002-2003

My time at the Center was one of the most fulfilling years of my writing career. I accomplished much of what I’d set out to do but I also went in directions I could not have planned. Such digressions, in my experience, are a sign of real progress because the best narratives don’t always follow the author’s original intent. Residential fellowships aim to cultivate cross-pollination and this can be an elusive thing. We 2007-2008 Cullman Fellows had a magical year. I hadn’t anticipated the direct ways in which the other Fellows’ work would steer aspects of my own. More generally, we inspired one another and through the long hours, kept each other company. We had a terrific amount of fun. I trust I join a chorus in saying that the Cullman Center fellowship is unique and that it makes an enormous contribution to public and private intellectual life – well-tuned, freeing; an experience allowing rigor in an atmosphere of beauty and peace.
- Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, journalist. Fellow 2007-2008

COMPETITION DEADLINE

Completed applications and letters of recommendation for the Cullman Center fellowship must be received by Friday, September 25, 2009. Candidates will learn the results of the competition in early March.

My year at the Center has brought me closer to knowing what it means to be a writer, and, as well, it has given me a larger perspective on the world into which I am writing.
- Donald Antrim, novelist and writer of memoirs. Fellow 2002-2003

The Center being idyllic, I cannot conceive of any way the program might be enhanced, aside from offering rehab for alumni. Thank you for the most productive year of my writing life.
- Stacy Schiff, biographer. Fellow 2002-2003

The resources of The New York Public Library and the Cullman Center certainly keep the life of the mind admirably well-nourished. But what made the year most exceptional to me was the life it offered beyond the books. I wanted to come to the Center in part because of its singular mix of people working in different styles, and I was not disappointed by the social and intellectual atmosphere this created, from casual interaction amongst the Fellows, to the weekly lunches and the first-rate public programs sponsored by the Center. I also greatly admire the Center’s outreach efforts to high school teachers and students.
- Maya Jasanoff, historian, Harvard University. Fellow 2006-2007

The Cullman Center gave me the time and occasion to reflect, in an environment of new books and new friends, at a moment when it was important for me to do exactly that. My essential view of Francis Bacon is certainly wider and, I hope, deeper than it would have been without the time spent at the Center.
- Mark Stevens, biographer, Fellow 2007-2008

In a long career, I have never had the opportunity to think about and work on a subject of any proportions or continuity in an uninterrupted and concentrated time frame, and with such superb facilities – this is the rarest of luxuries and the greatest of gifts.
- Ada Louise Huxtable, architectural historian. Fellow 1999-2000

This year's Fellows counted ourselves fortunate indeed, because an almost magical spirit of camaraderie and generosity animated our life together.
- George Chauncey, historian, Yale University. Fellow 2004-2005

FUNDING

The Cullman Center is made possible by a generous endowment from Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman in honor of Brooke Russell Astor, with major support provided by Mrs. John L. Weinberg, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Estate of Charles J. Liebman, Mel and Lois Tukman, John and Constance Birkelund, The Samuel I. Newhouse Foundation, and additional gifts from The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, Helen and Roger Alcaly, The Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation, William W. Karatz, The Rona Jaffe Foundation, The von der Heyden Family Foundation, and Lybess Sweezy and Ken Miller.