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, 1,128 Newcombe Fellows have been named representing seventy-five American universities. These promising 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-one Newcombe Fellows selected for 2012-13.
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 members 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. Past 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 over $740,000 from the Newcombe Foundation to administer the program for 2012-13. In thirty-two years of funding, this program has received over $20 million to support Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowships.