Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation
/OVERVIEW: The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation funds research and dissertation awards that address violence through the lenses of various academic disciplines. Grantmaking largely supports university-level social science and humanities research.
IP TAKE: The Guggenheim Foundation is only of the most well-known funders of humanities and medical research. As a result, grants predominately support scholars and graduate students. This foundation places no geographic or citizenship restrictions on its grantmaking, but more than half of all grants are directed toward researchers and teams working at universities in the U.S. Guggenheim runs open application processes and posts guidelines for each program on its website.
There might not be degree requirements here, but grantees usually hold advanced degrees. This is a highly competitive grant space, which requires an academic-level proposal. This is not a funding space for most kinds of organizations, unless they’re affiliated with a university and conduct academic research in some regard. The foundation prioritizes scholars from well-known universities. This is an accessible funder with one-time support that can be bureaucratic in its approach.
PROFILE: The late Harry Frank Guggenheim incorporated the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation in 1929. Based in New York, the foundation supports “scholarly research on problems of violence, aggression, and dominance.” Guggenheim’s research priorities include youth, family, media, crime, biology, war and peace, terrorism, religion, ethnicity, and nationalism. The foundation runs separate grantmaking programs for distinguished scholars and emerging scholars. It periodically publishes articles and findings in its own publications and runs the annual Harry Frank Guggenheim Symposium on Crime in America at CUNY’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City.
Grants for Humanities Research and Social Science Research
While affiliation with an institution of higher education is not a requirement for Guggenheim’s research grantmaking program, almost all grants prioritize researchers or research teams at colleges and universities.
The emerging scholars program is strictly limited to doctoral students “approaching their final year of work.” Recent funding has been concentrated in the fields of sociology, history, political science, international affairs, anthropology and economics, with only a few grants going to research in the fields of medicine, psychology and public health.
Funded Distinguished Scholar Awards support leading researchers working to address issues surrounding violence, crime and associated variables.
One recently funded study, at the University of Minnesota, concerned the culture of violence in the late Ottoman Empire, while a research grant to a professor at the University of Oregon the role of the state in the gender violence epidemic in Guatemala.
Dissertation grants have also prioritized studies of violence, including studies of gun violence, determinants of aggressive behaviors and historical and anthropological studies of wars and revolutions.
Signature research awards include the Harry Frank Guggenheim African Fellows, which supports emerging African scholars focused on violence on the African continent.
Grants for Criminal Justice Reform and Journalism
The foundation has recently demonstrated an interest in criminal justice reform in the U.S. Each year, the Center on Media, Crime and Justice at John Jay selects 20-30 Harry Frank Guggenheim Journalism Fellows to attend the symposium. “Working reporters, producers, editors, and correspondents come together with leading national and state criminal justice researchers, policymakers, and practitioners” to better examine the “dynamics of crime and violence.”
The symposium also hosts the annual Harry Frank Guggenheim Awards for Excellence in Criminal Justice Journalism. The prizes, which are administered by the Center on Media, Crime and Justice, “recognize the previous year’s best print and online justice reporting by a U.S.-based media outlet.”
Among its grantees are doctoral dissertations and scholarly research projects that address the prevalent decline in crime during the 1990s, urban violence, prison gangs, xenophobia and law enforcement practices. This may become a growing area of funding to watch.
Grants for Science Research
Grants for science research account for only a small portion of Guggenheim’s grantmaking, which most often supports research in the social sciences or the humanities. However, the foundation is open to funding medical, pharmacological or animal research that addresses the human problems of “violence, aggression and dominance.”
Important Grant Details:
The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation’s research and dissertation grantmaking programs together give away about $600,000 a year. Research grants generally range from$15,000 to $40,000 per year for up to four-year periods. Dissertation fellowships are awarded for $20,000, usually the last year of a student’s doctoral research.
This funder runs open application programs for its research grants and dissertation fellowships. Research grants are accepted from researchers or teams of researchers from any country. While most grants go to scholars who hold advanced degrees, there are no degree requirements for application.
Most grants fund scholars and researchers studying the problem of violence through the lenses of sociology, history, political science, international affairs, anthropology and economics. To a lesser extent the foundation supports work in the fields of medicine, pharmacology and health and does not rule out funding for research on violence and related social problems in other disciplines.
The deadline for research grant applications is August 1. Dissertation fellowships are open to doctoral students “approaching the final year of their Ph.D. work,” but are not specifically awarded for research but, instead, are intended to support students more generally and help them complete degree requirements on time. The deadline for dissertation fellowship applications is February 1.
General inquiries may be directed to foundation staff via email or telephone at 646-428-0971.
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