RAI and Gilder Lehrman Institute offer travel awards for research in New York City

William Warby

The RAI and the Gilder Lehrman Institute, the leading non-profit organisation for history education for schools and the general public, have established a partnership to offer travel awards for research in New York. 

Each year, the RAI awards around fifteen travel grants to graduate and undergraduate students undertaking primary research in the United States. Thanks to the new partnership, award recipients who are travelling to the New York area will be nominated as RAI-Gilder Lehrman Fellows. Awardees will receive the RAI's travel award to cover travel and subsistence costs; the GLI will aim to provide free access to the New-York Historical Society, the digital archive of the Gilder Lehrman Collection, and use of a desk if/as available at the Institute's offices on W. 45th St., New York. GLI will also advise awardees on visiting speakers and programmes on American history across New York City and offer them information about archives in NYC as well as introductions, as appropriate, to curators and historians in their field of research.

Should the awardees' research visits to New York coincide with one of the five major annual award presentations sponsored by the GLI (Frederick Douglass Book Prize; George Washington Prize; Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize; Gilder Lehrman Prize for Military History; National History Teachers of the Year Awards), they would be welcome to attend as a guest.

Halbert Jones, Director of the RAI, said: "We are delighted to have this exciting opportunity to collaborate and to forge closer links with the Gilder Lehrman Institute. The experience of RAI travel grant recipients carrying out research in the New York area will be greatly enhanced by this partnership. For an undergraduate or graduate student conducting field work abroad, a local affiliation and access to local resources can make a big difference, and support from an organisation like the GLI, with its deep commitment to the study of American history, will be especially valuable to members of our community."

James Basker, President of the Gilder Lehrman Institute, said: "From my first tour of the RAI, I knew that this partnership was a wonderful idea, and I am thrilled that it has come to fruition. We look forward to hosting RAI scholars and showing them the best of what Gilder Lehrman has to offer."

The next deadlines for submission of applications for RAI travel awards will be in April 2019 (for graduate students) and May 2019 (for undergraduate students). Please see the travel awards section of the RAI's website for more details.