Do you have any guidelines for writing the research proposal and the scholarly writing sample?

Research Proposal

Your research proposal should be no longer than 2000 words. References and citations will not count towards the word limit. The Selection Committee is most interested in the relevance and the contribution your research makes to your discipline. These should be clear in the research proposal.

The Selection Committee is also interested in how you intend to use the two years of the fellowship. In many cases, Academy Scholars intend to use the first year to prepare the dissertation for publication as a book or a series of articles and the second year for a new research project. If applicable, scholars should summarize their publication plans and future research plans. If you expect to begin a new research project that is significantly different than your PhD dissertation, you should introduce the topic and perhaps explain how your new research continues/expands your doctoral research or takes you in a different direction.

Applicants may wish to consult the essay "On the Art of Writing Proposals" (pdf) by Przeworski and Salomon on the SSRC website. Note, however, that this essay is written with specific proposals in mind, rather than The Harvard Academy's broader interest in an applicant's research and her or his plans beyond the first project.

Scholarly Writing Sample

The size of the writing sample should be equivalent to a single PhD dissertation chapter or single-authored peer-reviewed academic journal article. It may be published or unpublished but must be in English. The maximum page length is 50 pages (references, citations, formulas, and graphs do not count toward the page limit). Only one writing sample may be submitted. Any pdf files with multiple writing samples will not be considered.