Call for Nominations | 2025-2026 HMUI Doctoral Fellows

HMUI is accepting faculty nominations for the 2025-2026 HMUI Doctoral Fellows. We will also accept direct applications from PhD candidates who meet the necessary criteria, outlined below. The HMUI Doctoral Fellows are advanced graduate students from across the university whose dissertation research is concerned with urban issues, questions, and conditions.

The fellows participate in an interdisciplinary Doctoral Workshop that meets ~six times during the academic year to discuss work-in-progress. Each fellow also receives a stipend of $1,250 towards expenses related to dissertation research and professional development. The Doctoral Workshop provides the interdisciplinary group of PhD students with a venue to discuss their written work in a collegial and dynamic environment, where they learn how to negotiate depth and breadth in their research and become exposed to modes of inquiry that they might not otherwise encounter within their home disciplines. The workshop is chaired by the HMUI directors. In addition to participation in the workshop, doctoral fellows are expected to be active in public events connected to the Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative.

We will select PhD students who are ABD and far enough advanced in their dissertations to have a chapter draft which they can workshop. We invite you to nominate candidates, sending us a short paragraph that briefly comments on why you think this student will benefit and contribute to the workshop, as well as on the significance of their work both to the student’s disciplinary field and to the broader interdisciplinary field of urban studies. This will help us to assemble a cohort of doctoral fellows whose work is distinguished and reflects the range of urban-related research and scholarship across Harvard.

We ask you submit your nomination or by Friday, June 20th, 2025, to HMUI@harvard.edu. We will then contact the nominated students, inviting them to submit an application consisting of a CV and research statement. Decisions will be announced in July.