APS Franklin Research Grants 2027: Up to $7,000 for Archive Travel, Fieldwork, and Lab Costs, With Deadlines of 1 October and 1 December 2026

APS Franklin Research Grants 2027: Up to $7,000 for Archive Travel, Fieldwork, and Lab Costs, With Deadlines of 1 October and 1 December 2026

Most research funding is built around salary. The Franklin Research Grants are built around the opposite problem: the scholar already has the time, already has the project, and simply cannot afford the plane ticket to the archive that holds the only surviving copy of the manuscript.

The American Philosophical Society — founded by Benjamin Franklin in 1743 and still headquartered in Philadelphia — runs the Franklin program as a small, unglamorous, extraordinarily useful grant. It pays up to $7,000 directly to an individual scholar to cover the hard costs of getting to the evidence. No overhead goes to a university. No portion is skimmed for indirect costs. The money is for travel, reproduction, fieldwork, and laboratory work, and the Society is unusually explicit about what it will and will not fund.

For the current cycle there are two deadlines: 1 October 2026, which produces a January 2027 decision for work beginning February 2027, and 1 December 2026, which produces a March 2027 decision for work beginning April 2027. Both funding windows run through January 2028.

Key details

What the money actually covers

The Society defines the scope narrowly, and reading that definition carefully is the single highest-return thing an applicant can do before writing a word.

Franklin grants are designed to meet:

• the costs of travel to libraries and archives for research purposes;
• the purchase of microfilm, photocopies, or equivalent research materials;
• the costs associated with fieldwork;
• laboratory research expenses.

That is the whole list. The programme funds noncommercial research only.

The exclusions are equally firm, and they eliminate a large share of the budgets that scholars instinctively write. Franklin grants will not pay for:

• attendance at conferences;
• the costs of publication;
• overhead or indirect costs to any institution;
• income tax on the award itself;
• salary replacement during a leave of absence, or lost earnings from summer teaching;
• living expenses while working at home;
• consultants or research assistants;
• permanent equipment — computers, cameras, tape recorders, laboratory apparatus.

Two of these deserve emphasis because they catch experienced applicants. First, “living expenses while working at home” is disallowed, which means a budget line for months of writing time in your own city will not survive review. The grant moves you somewhere. Second, permanent equipment is out even when the equipment is genuinely necessary — a camera to photograph documents is not fundable, though the reproduction fees the archive charges are.

Grants are also not retroactive. Work you have already done and paid for cannot be reimbursed. The application asks separately for the “inclusive dates of trip or project” and the “specific dates for APS support”; the first is the full arc of the work, the second is the exact window in which APS money would be spent. Those specific dates must sit inside the eligible funding window for the deadline you choose.

Finally, the award is taxable income to the recipient. The Society notes that it is not required to report the payments, and recommends grantees discuss their obligations with a tax adviser. Budget with that in mind — $7,000 awarded is not $7,000 spendable.

Who this fits

The Franklin program is unusually open on discipline and unusually strict on career stage.

On discipline, it is effectively agnostic. The recent recipient lists span archaeology in Kyrgyzstan and Mongolia, linguistic documentation of the Asturian language, palaeontology of early tyrannosaurs, the history of humanitarian aid in Mexico, Byzantine and Mycenaean household archaeology, ayahuasca and religion in Brazil, and the mapping of community-protected fengshui forests in China. Humanities projects dominate by volume, but fieldwork-heavy natural science and social science projects are plainly fundable.

On career stage, the rule is sharp: you must hold the doctorate at the time of application, or have published work of doctoral character and quality. The Society defines that second route as publications that are “scholarly in nature and length, with extensive footnotes and possibly, though not necessarily, peer reviewed.” PhD candidates are not eligible. The only exception is the applicant who has completed everything and is merely waiting for the degree to be formally conferred.

Within the eligible pool, the Society states plainly that it is “particularly interested in supporting the work of young scholars who have recently received the doctorate,” and its own FAQ goes further: where several applicants compete for the same funds, a junior scholar will be favoured over a senior colleague. Senior scholars are still funded, and all proposals are judged on merit — but the tiebreak is explicit and it runs toward the early career.

The programme is also a genuine option for people outside the tenure track. Independent scholars are explicitly welcome, as are faculty at two-year institutions and at four-year institutions that are not research universities. Because the grant is paid to the individual and carries no overhead, it does not require an institutional sponsor to take a cut or sign off on a budget.

Citizenship works in two directions. American citizens and US residents — including foreign nationals and permanent residents affiliated with a US institution — may carry out the funded work anywhere in the world. Foreign nationals not affiliated with a US institution are eligible, but their project must be carried out in the United States.

The three add-on fellowships inside the Franklin program

The Franklin application doubles as the entry point for three additional awards, and applicants routinely miss them.

APS/British Academy Fellowship for Research in London. Run jointly with the British Academy, this exchange postdoctoral fellowship supports a minimum of one and a maximum of two months of research in London’s archives and libraries. It covers travel between the United States and the United Kingdom plus a monthly subsistence paid by the APS. There is no separate form: apply to the Franklin program by the 1 October deadline and indicate that you want to be considered. Applicants not selected for the British Academy Fellowship are still considered for a standard Franklin grant, so opting in costs nothing.

American Trust for the British Library (ATBL) Fellowship. A $2,500 award that lets a scholar add British Library research onto an already-awarded short-term research grant from an American research collection. Indicate interest on the Franklin application at either the October or December deadline; successful Franklin applicants who flagged it are referred on to the ATBL. Further detail lives at atbl.us.

APS/Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) Fellowship, Edinburgh. A visiting fellowship of two to four months at the University of Edinburgh’s IASH during calendar year 2027, in any area of the humanities or social sciences. The Institute particularly welcomes applications tied to disability and chronic illness, connected to its Project on Chronic Illness and Disability. IASH gives each fellow a private office in an eighteenth-century courtyard beside the university library, with borrowing rights and access to the National Library of Scotland, the National Archives of Scotland, and the libraries of the Society of Antiquaries in Scotland and the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. Fellows give at least one seminar and are expected to participate in Institute life. This one is applied for through the IASH site, and that application also serves as a Franklin application.

One caution: the APS page gives the IASH deadline as 26 February 2027 in the programme description and as 23 February in its own FAQ. The two dates are inconsistent on the official page as published. Treat the earlier date as operative and confirm directly with IASH or with the APS grants office before relying on it.

The application itself

The application is submitted through the APS online portal, reachable from the “Apply for a Franklin Research Grant” link on the programme page. The Society also publishes a sample application as a downloadable file, and it is worth reading before you start — it shows the shape of the form rather than making you discover it live.

The form is governed by tight character limits, all of which include spaces:

A 5,500-character project description is roughly 800 to 900 words. That is short. It is not a grant narrative with a literature review, a methods section, and a dissemination plan; it is a compressed statement of what you are studying, why the specific materials you need to reach matter, and what you will do with them.

The 3,000-character “reasons for requested budget” field is where most applications are won or lost, and it is generously sized relative to the description — which tells you how seriously the Society takes it. Use it to justify the trip concretely: which repository, which collections, why those materials are not available digitally or closer to home, how many days you need and why, and what the actual costs are. Vague budgets in a programme whose entire purpose is covering specific hard costs read as unprepared.

The bibliography field should include works cited in the project statement plus publications reflecting current and historical scholarship in your subject area.

Letters of support: the part people mishandle

Two letters of support are required, and they are due on the application deadline, not after it. This is the most common procedural failure in the programme.

The mechanics matter. As soon as you enter your referees’ contact details in the portal, the system emails them instructions for submitting directly. The Society’s own advice is to complete that section before filling in the rest of the application, so your writers have the maximum runway. You do not have to wait for the letters to arrive before submitting your own materials, and you can check their status through the “track references” link inside your account.

Two substantive points. First, the Society explicitly discourages submitting letters through Interfolio, on the grounds that dossier letters tend to be too long — they may be truncated when they hit the 5,500-character limit — and are typically generic rather than about the project. A boilerplate letter of recommendation is close to useless here. Second, letters “must directly address the project outlined in the proposal.” Your referees cannot do that unless they have read it, and they will not see the proposal in the portal. Send them your project statement yourself, well ahead of the deadline, and tell them which parts of the plan you most need corroborated.

Timeline and deadline strategy

The two deadlines are not simply early and late versions of the same competition — they lead to different funding windows.

The 1 October 2026 deadline produces a decision in January 2027, and the funded work may run from February 2027 through January 2028. The 1 December 2026 deadline produces a decision in March 2027, with work from April 2027 through January 2028.

Choose based on when you can actually travel. If your archive access, field season, or teaching schedule points to spring 2027, you need the October round; the December round simply cannot fund February or March work. If your window is summer 2027 or later, either deadline works, and the December round may give you more time to sharpen the proposal.

There is one helpful piece of portal behaviour: if your application still shows the status “in progress” on 2 October, it does not disappear. You can keep working on it and submit it to the December deadline instead. That said, only one application per competition is permitted, and you may not submit multiple applications for different projects in the same cycle.

If you are also seeking the British Academy Fellowship for London, the October deadline is mandatory — that add-on is not available in the December round.

Common mistakes

Budgeting for things the programme excludes. Conference travel, publication subventions, research assistants, and laptops are all explicitly ineligible, and including them signals that the applicant did not read the scope statement.

Treating it as a writing fellowship. The grant funds movement toward evidence. “Living expenses while working at home” is a named exclusion.

Applying before the PhD. Doctoral candidates are ineligible. The publications route requires genuinely doctoral-quality scholarly work, not conference papers or short reviews.

Generic letters. A dossier letter that praises your teaching and mentions the project in one clause fails the stated requirement that letters address the proposal directly.

Backdating. Grants are not retroactive. If the trip has happened, it cannot be funded.

Missing the two-year interval. Previous Franklin recipients must wait two years before reapplying, whether for a new project or a later stage of the same one.

Overrunning the character limits by writing first and cutting later. The limits are tight enough that they should shape the draft from the beginning.

Frequently asked questions

Do I have to be a US citizen? No. Applicants may be US residents — citizens, or foreign nationals and permanent residents affiliated with a US institution — or American citizens living abroad, and any of these may propose work anywhere in the world. Foreign nationals with no US institutional affiliation are eligible but must carry out the project in the United States.

Can I apply again after a previous Franklin grant? Yes, after an interval of two years. This applies to both new projects and later stages of the same project.

Does the British Academy or IASH award require a separate application? For the British Academy Fellowship, no — apply to the Franklin program by 1 October and indicate your interest. For IASH, the application is filed on the IASH website, and that submission also counts as your Franklin application; you do not file both.

What counts as “work of doctoral character and quality”? Publications that are scholarly in nature and length, with extensive footnotes. Peer review is possible but not required.

Are senior scholars ever funded? Yes. All proposals are judged on merit. But where several applicants compete for the same funds, the Society states it will favour the junior scholar.

What are the reporting obligations? Project and financial reports are due one month after the funded portion of the work is complete, following the timeframe you gave in the proposal. Instructions arrive with the award notification.

Preparing a competitive application

Start from the evidence, not the argument. The reviewers are deciding whether a specific body of material justifies a specific trip. Name the repository. Name the collection, and the finding aid or call numbers if you have them. Explain why the material is not digitised, or why the digitised surrogate is inadequate for your question — palaeographic detail, marginalia, watermarks, physical condition, unlisted holdings, whatever it actually is.

Then make the budget arithmetic visible. Airfare, ground transport, lodging at a stated nightly rate for a stated number of nights, reproduction fees at the repository’s published rate, permit costs for fieldwork, per-sample costs for lab analysis. A reviewer who can reconstruct your total from your prose trusts the request. A round number with no derivation does not read as careful.

Be honest about scale. The maximum is $7,000, and many awards are smaller. A project that only makes sense with $30,000 of support should be presented as a discrete, fundable segment — one archive, one season, one analytical run — rather than as a whole programme with a plainly insufficient budget attached.

Finally, contact the programme office if anything about your eligibility or use of funds is genuinely unclear. Linda Musumeci, Director of Grants and Fellowships, handles questions about the eligibility of a project or applicant, permissible uses of funds, and confirmation that an application and its two letters have been received, at 215-440-3429 via the contact details on the official page.

Official links

• Programme page and application guidelines: https://www.amphilsoc.org/grants/franklin-research-grants
• Sample application and reporting instructions: downloadable from the programme page
• American Trust for the British Library Transatlantic Fellowship Program: https://atbl.us/the-transatlantic-fellowship-program/
• APS Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, Edinburgh: http://www.iash.ed.ac.uk/american-philosophical-society-fellowship

Verify all dates and figures against the official APS page before applying. Amounts, deadlines, and the terms of the affiliated London and Edinburgh awards are set by the Society and can change between cycles.