Professor Andrew Albin Discusses Fellowship and Postdoc Application Process for Graduate Students
Professor Andrew Albin's scholarship in the field of historical sound studies examines embodied listening practices, sound’s meaningful contexts, and the lived aural experiences of historical hearers – in a word, the sonorous past – as an object of critical inquiry. His work has been recognized with grants and fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Medieval Academy of America, the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, and the Yale Institute of Sacred Music. Here, he offers to advice to graduate students on fellowships, post docs and professional development.
What are the grants/fellowships you received as a graduate student, and immediately after, that supported your academic career?
Outside grad student travel grants to attend and present papers at conferences, I received two internal fellowships/awards at Brandeis University (funded by the Mellon Foundation) and one external grant from the Medieval Academy of America. The internal research award and external grant together helped fund about 2 months of on-site archival research at libraries in the UK. The internal fellowship afforded me a sixth year of funding to devote entirely to the dissertation (I also worked at the Writing Center during this time to help supplement my income). I submitted and defended my dissertation in fall of my seventh year, and was granted a departmental prize instructorship (essentially, teaching a major elective) in spring of that year to help keep me afloat; I also had to take out a modest student loan to supplement income. I found out in February of that seventh year that I’d been accepted as a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies in Toronto. That year allowed me to start the work that would turn into my first book; it was also a crucial period that helped me shift my self-perception from advanced grad student to junior scholar. I went on the job market for the second consecutive year that year, which was when I applied to and received the offer from Fordham to join our faculty.
What are three things to keep in mind while crafting a project narrative?
I’ll offer three guidelines, and a fourth addendum.
1) Help your reader see the big picture and its stakes. Because we’re often so close to our materials, because we spend so much time in the weeds, it can be really difficult to pull back and give your reader the most compelling holistic vision of your proposed project. Your reader’s don’t really care about the minutiae — they need to be able to hold your project in their mind’s eye and see it clearly, and they need to see why your project matters, if not to their own intellectual circles, then to the intellectual communities in which you and your project circulate. Rhetoric is helpful here: a memorable image or turn of phrase that helps bring the project into focus packs more punch than a metric ton of theoretical neologisms.
Think broadly about the communities who might benefit from your project, and try to speak to them, instead of to your dissertation committee. When you’re proposing a project that’s still getting worked out in your own head, it’s better to offer a provisionally worked-out project you can satisfyingly narrativize than to be vague about what that project will look like in the end. Projects change direction; no one will check back and hold you to every last detail of your narrative.
2) Demonstrate that your project is feasible. Many applications ask for a timeline or roadmap for the work you plan to do during the tenure of the fellowship. You want to be able to point to your progress to date, articulate what kind of work remains to be done, and map that work out onto the time the grant/fellowship affords you to work. It’s important, I think, to be optimistic and realistic at the same time: take a confident posture towards your ability to accomplish what you propose, while indicating to your readers that you have a solid pragmatic sense of the work that entails. No one will ever fault you for shooting high with the proposal and not quite meeting the mark, but if you can recognize it’s simply not feasible to complete a project in its entirety during the fellowship tenure, so can your readers. I find it helpful to break down the work into steps or phases that I physically map on a calendar; you can then narrativize this calendar.
3) Situate your project in a bigger story about you. It’s rare that a fellowship project is standalone. Instead, it usually fits into a larger intellectual trajectory: dissertation chapters sprout off into talks and articles; postdoctoral projects draw on the dissertation and turn into first books; we discern the scholarly debates and research fields where our work makes an impact. By situating yourself inside these bigger stories that stretch before and after the fellowship, you give your reader a richer sense of how granting you a fellowship is a worthy investment in both the short- and the long-term. Framing your smaller fellowship project inside a bigger picture also rhetorically enhances the the feasibility of your project by comparison.
4) Many fellowships are residential or thematic. Never submit a generic narrative; give real thought to how you’ll fit into the residential community and its intellectual life, and/or think carefully about how the thematic topic legitimately intersects with your project. Flimsy or poorly researched justifications are always transparent.
How can graduate students make themselves excellent candidates for competitive fellowships?
Planning and keeping you and your recommenders on task is one of the biggest hurdles—it takes time to prepare a strong application, plus you want to spare yourself the massive last minute expenditure of effort, energy, and emotion that comes with madly throwing together an application for a fellowship you’ve discovered a week before deadline.
It’s never too early to build a calendar of fellowships you want to apply to and what they require for application; deadlines don’t always follow an apply in October/November, hear back in March/April rhythm. With recommenders, I like to contact them early (I’d recommend at least 3 months ahead of time) to give them the heads up, then follow up with a calendar of fellowships and deadlines, plus all relevant materials that can help in the writing of a strong letter (application narratives, CV, project outline). It’s courteous to coordinate online registration of recommenders on application portals; then send a note clarifying what’s forthcoming in their email inboxes, and remind them of due dates.
In addition to planning early, get lots of feedback on your narratives, not just from your peers, but also from faculty. (This means drafting your narratives well before the application deadline, so you have time for feedback and revision!) And talk with faculty about the fellowships you’re applying to: if they’ve applied themselves, or know other scholars who have, they can sometimes provide you with valuable insight about what the institution is looking for in applicants, projects, and narratives.
Based on your experience, what advice would you give to graduate students around identifying and applying to fellowships?
The PhD Student Handbook is your best resource for staying on top of internal fellowships at Fordham. You’ll also receive email reminders when those and new funding opportunities become available. The DGS can also be a great resource for helping you stay on top of your funding and helping you figure out how best to sustain it. For external fellowships, there’s a mass of data out there on the internet, and it can take a decent chunk of time to sift through. Give yourself that time and draw up a shortlist of fellowship options for which you feel you can reasonably craft a compelling set of application materials. Be sure you are only applying to fellowships whose qualifications you can meet at the time of application, or, sometimes, at the time of receipt — check the language! A number of university department websites and professional scholarly organizations maintain lists of grad student grants and fellowships relevant to areas of study and scholarly discipline; mine these for all they’re worth.
Based on your experience, what advice would you give to graduate students around identifying and applying to postdocs?
Similar advice as above for external fellowships: sift through the data, draw up a shortlist, take the time to craft compelling materials, make sure you meet qualifications. Postdocs are a somewhat different animal, in that they’re almost always residential, and they’re understood to provide junior scholars with an opportunity to develop their work in a supportive intellectual community while still on the job market. Keep in mind that some fellowships will invite or require you to teach. You’ll want to have well-developed course proposals and syllabi at the ready, and you’ll want to take some time to figure out how those courses might fit into the curriculum of the funding institution. Lastly (though this may have changed since I was applying for postdocs) junior research fellowships offered by British universities are anecdotally *very* difficult for US applicants to receive, if you don’t already have a relationship with the university/college offering the fellowship. Unless you have a compelling reason, I’d generally dissuade the application.
Are there any tips on professional development you would give to current graduate students?
This is such a big question, and it depends very much, I think, on what each student is individually seeking to get out of graduate studies, now and in the future. Having periodic, honest conversations with yourself, your friends, your mentors, and your loved ones about just that—what you want to get out of graduate studies, not just tomorrow but also today, right now—is something I’d urgently encourage!
If I could offer a slightly cagey response, I might also say: interrogate the notion of “professional development” a little. I’d encourage graduate students to stay resourceful in imagining how the experiences, knowledges, and skills they acquire during the course of graduate studies translate into a career and a profession. And I’d encourage students not to neglect those forms of development that don’t hammer us over the head as directly accruing to a successful academic career. Lastly, with respect to fellowships and grants: many of these ask for a short narrative at the end of your fellowship/grant tenure to reflect on the work you accomplished. Don't forget to submit these!