Grants and Fellowships

In preparing for senior thesis work, concentrators in the Study of Religion have often chosen to conduct research in the summer. For example, one student studying Buddhism lived in a Zen monastery in southern Japan for three months; another student working on modern Christianity did fieldwork among Christian activists in Nicaragua; still another student spent a summer tracing the headwaters of the Ganges and studying popular Hinduism.

Harvard has a number of institutes and centers that provide summer research grants for undergraduate fieldwork and research. Depending upon the project, a student may apply for grants from, among others, the Center for African Studies, the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, the Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, the Henry Rosovsky Undergraduate Research Fund, the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American and Iberian Studies, the Center for International Affairs, and the Josephine Murray Traveling Fellowship Program of Radcliffe College. For more information students should consult the Harvard College Funding Sources database, listed below.

Prizes

Study of Religion Senior Thesis Prize. This small monetary prize is given out for a Religion thesis of highest distinction and is presented at the end of the academic year.

Thomas T. Hoopes Prize. This is a prize open to all undergraduates doing outstanding scholarly work on any topic. The fund provides undergraduate thesis prizes that are given with the purpose of "promoting, improving and enhancing the quality of education." Undergraduates must be nominated by their thesis supervisors.

There are other Harvard College prizes available for outstanding theses and essays. For more information: http://prizes.fas.harvard.edu.