I. “What is the difference between a Dissertation Prospectus and a Dissertation Fellowship Proposal?”

When you write a Dissertation Prospectus, you are basically asking your own department to decide whether your project is acceptable or not; you are not competing against anyone, you are not trying to win anything, but simply submitting a research topic that you argue needs to be done. In most cases, your professors will be fully equipped with the necessary background to understand your arguments — you are essentially “preaching to the converted.”   Many departments have their own rules as to what a Prospectus should be — how long, what to include, what format to use, and other requirements — but essentially, the Prospectus is a fairly detailed explanation of your project.

When you write a Dissertation Fellowship Proposal you are usually entering a highly competitive contest, judged by an anonymous Fellowship Committee, and you are asking them to decide that you deserve to win and — yes — that someone else deserves to lose. In this situation, it will not do simply to describe a project that is acceptable; instead, you must develop a highly persuasive and polished argument that will convince the reader that your proposed project will make an important contribution, that it deserves to be funded. The argument should be so carefully constructed that each sentence and each paragraph will pass the test of advancing your contribution argument in the most tightly knit and logically coherent fashion.

Before you can construct such a tightly knit argument, you must first decide what your contribution argument will be. There are three possible paradigms for describing how a study will contribute to the field:

A. It brings to light new material that hitherto has been overlooked by scholars (an archival discovery, or some body of material whose significance has not yet been recognized). The burden of the argument in this paradigm is to show why the new material is important, and should no longer be neglected.

B. It studies well-known material that has been examined many times before — which is the opposite of paradigm A — but calls for a reassessment by looking at it in a new way. With this paradigm, it is wise not to attack all preceding work, but to stress that you are adding a new dimension, thanks to the work that has already been done.

C. It does some combination of A and B: it exposes some new material which in turn calls for some reassessment of what has already been done.

Once again, a Proposal is best thought of as making a persuasive argument, and all items in that Proposal should be used to advance the argument that your project will make an important contribution to the field.

II. “Should I include footnotes and bibliography in a Fellowship Proposal?”

When only a brief Statement is requested (of no more than six double-spaced pages), normally the scholarly apparatus is kept to a minimum. References are normally included directly in the text, rather than in footnotes, and are highly abbreviated — usually author by last name and date of publication in parentheses. The Proposal can be accompanied by a Selected Bibliography, even if one is not required. In some competitions, usually when a longer and more elaborate proposal is required (around ten double-spaced pages), you will be expected to have references. These can still be in abbreviated form within the text, or you may use foot-notes. In either case, this type of proposal should be accompanied by a Bibliography — usually a Selected Bibliography is all that is needed.

III. “Who serves on fellowship selection committees — will our proposals be read by specialists in our own field, or simply by generalists?”

Most people want to know the answer to this question so that they can address their proposal to the appropriate audience. The problem is that even in competitions that are judged by people in your own discipline, you cannot or should not assume that they are fully knowledgeable about your own specialized topic. Indeed, even specialists need convincing, and may in fact view your proposal with a more critical eye. The safest course to follow is to provide enough background in making your contribution argument, that both generalists and specialists will view the background as a necessary and logical part of your contribution argument. It is also wise to avoid jargon or un-necessary technical terms.

IV. “How do I write an Abstract for a Fellowship Proposal?”

An abstract or summary of the proposal is often required; most federal agencies require 200 or 250 words. Although the abstract usually appears at the beginning of a proposal, it is best to write it last. The abstract should consist of the very best parts of your proposal; it should involve a process of cutting and pasting from the longer version, making sentence adjustments or adding transitions as needed for full coherence. There is no need to worry about redundancy — after all, the abstract is describing the same dissertation project as the long version is.

For a more detailed discussion of Fellowship Proposals and samples of winning Harvard proposals, see Scholarly Pursuits.