The Charlotte W. Newcombe Foundation funds a major program of graduate fellowships in the humanities and social sciences. These fellowships support students in the final stages of doctoral study whose work offers significant potential for advancing academic scholarship related to ethics and/or religion. The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation administers all aspects of this program, including a rigorous national competition for Newcombe Fellowships each year.
Since the first round of competition in 1981, 1,067 Newcombe Fellows have been named representing eighty-five American universities. These young scholars' dissertations have added knowledge in their disciplines and have addressed issues of contemporary significance. History, literature, religion, philosophy and anthropology have been the most-represented fields of study. Click here for a list of the twenty-nine Newcombe Fellows selected for 2009-10.
The Newcombe Fellows have achieved a high rate of degree completion and a fine record of academic employment. Fellows from the early years of the program are now senior faculty at major research universities and selective liberal arts colleges, curators and directors at significant scholarly archives, and leaders and policymakers at nonprofit organizations and in cabinet-level government agencies. In the past decade, Newcombe Fellows have received national honors such as the MacArthur Fellowship, the Guggenheim Fellowship, and election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation was awarded a grant of $921,217 from the Newcombe Foundation to administer the program for 2009-10. In twenty-nine years of funding, this program has received $18,166,000.