Graduate Awards

The David Lenson Fellowship for Comparative Literature Graduate Students was established in 2023 to support language study and/or field work abroad. Applicants must have completed at least one year of course work in the Comparative Literature graduate program without incompletes. They should demonstrate at minimum an intermediate level in the language of the destination country. Preference will be given to candidates who are seeking to obtain advanced proficiency in a third language.

Award Amount: $1,000

To apply, please go to umass.academicworks.com. There you will first need to complete the general (campus-wide) application. Once you have completed the general application, search under “Opportunities” for the David Lenson Fellowship (Graduates), and you’ll find an explanation of the rest of the application process.

REAL Fellowships are awarded to outstanding doctoral and MFA students from historically underrepresented groups in the humanities and arts, social sciences, education, nursing and business. The fellowship provides four years of summer support in the form of a $5,000 fellowship each summer. 

For more information, please visit https://www.umass.edu/graduate/office-inclusion-engagement/real-fellowship.

The University of Massachusetts provides awards to support pre-dissertation research, dissertation completion, travel, and other aspects of graduate research. For more information, visit https://www.umass.edu/graduate/funding/internal-funding.

Students are encouraged to present their work at conferences and the program is pleased to provide some funding support to facilitate this. Students should apply for funding as early as possible; deadlines for funding requests are November 1 and March 1 of the fiscal year in which the conference is to take place. (The fiscal year runs from July 1-June 30.) You can request conference funding through our internal application here.

All conference travel must ALSO be entered into the university online travel registry website (Concur) PRIOR to travel. You can register your travel by going to the Concur webpage (linked here); then select "Login to Concur" from the column on the left-hand side of the page. You can apply for funding from Comp Lit before you register your travel, but your travel must be registered before your trip.

Students are required to notify the Graduate Program Director (GPD) if they decide not to attend a conference for which they requested funding so that the funding can be made available to other students. Likewise, students must notify the GPD by email upon their return from a conference, confirming their attendance for program records.

Detailed information about how to apply for funding is located here. The funding application form can be found here.