Medieval: Funding
The department is happy to be able to award tuition waivers on the basis of academic merit to the majority of entering Ph.D. students in their first year. Tuition support is typically available to all students after the end of the first year provided they have made satisfactory progress in their coursework and seminar paper research. University stipends are awarded to entering students on the basis of academic merit;those students who enter without stipends are eligible at the end of their first year to be considered for the Mellon Achievement and Phoenix Fellowships, as well as smaller University stipends.
While there are no fellowships set aside specifically for medieval
history graduates, the department is able every year to nominate
a number of advanced graduate students for various dissertation
write-up fellowships administered through the Social Sciences division
and the University. These include the William Rainey Harper Fellowship,
the Mellon Dissertation Write-up Fellowship, and the Collegiate-Divisional
Teaching 
Fellowship, all of which provide support for a final year of dissertation
writing. Students in History are also eligible to be nominated by the
department for Overseas Dissertation Research Fellowships, which provide
support for dissertation research prior to writing-up. The department
regularly awards funding in smaller amounts in the form of research travel
fellowships and conference travel grants. Students who are eligible for
the federal Work/Study program may also serve as research assistants for
individual faculty members.
At the University of Chicago, there are also dissertation fellowships available through the Franke Institute (for students in the Humanities) and the Martin Marty Center at the Divinity School (for students of religion).
All students are strongly encouraged to seek outside support for their dissertation research and writing. The American Historical Association maintains a list of Grants, Fellowships and Prizes of Interest to Historians, which members of the AHA can access on-line. There is also a print copy available in the department office. For students in medieval studies, the Medieval Academy of America also maintains a list of grants and fellowships, as well as sponsoring Dissertation Grants for which members of the Academy are eligible to apply.
In recent years, medievalist graduate students at Chicago have been particularly successful in gaining fellowship support from the Newberry Library through the Annette Kade Fellowship in French or German Studies in the Middle Ages or Renaissance, and the Spencer Foundation Fellowships in the History of Education; and from the Erasmus Institute at the University of Notre Dame, which offers residential dissertation fellowships for scholars working in the Catholic intellectual tradition. Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, offers residential dissertation fellowships for scholars in Byzantine studies, as well as short-term summer fellowships.
For students needing to work with manuscript and microfilm collections, a number of national libraries offer short-term research fellowships. Such libraries with significant medieval holdings include the Beinecke Library, Yale University; the Houghton Library, Harvard University; the Huntingdon Library, San Marino; and the Hill Monastic Manuscript Library, St. John’s University. In addition, the St. Louis University Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies offers five-week long fellowships for research at the Vatican Film Library and in the St. Louis Room’s Rare book collection in the Pius XII Memorial Library.
Other national fellowship competitions for which medievalists are eligible include the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowships in Humanistic Studies and the fellowships offered through the Social Science Research Council. There are a number of programs administered by the U.S. Department of Education to which medievalists may apply for support, including the Foreign Language & Area Studies Fellowship Program (FLAS), the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Program, the Fulbright Program of the Institute for International Education, and the Jacob K. Javitz Fellowship Program for students entering or in their first year of graduate research.