Announcing the Alumni and Friends Graduate Fellowship Endowment

Over its thirty years, graduate students in history have been a critical part of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. Graduate students don’t just take classes and work on faculty projects. They create innovative scholarship that fulfills RRCHNM’s mission of creating history in new media. Most recently, history graduate students at George Mason University have rethought what a dissertation in history can mean, creating dissertations not in the conventional form of a rough draft of a book, but using websites, computation, visualization, and audio to create entirely new forms of scholarship.

But since GMU is a relatively young research university, it has comparatively few fellowships for graduate students. Certainly that is the case at RRCHNM. The majority of our funding comes from grants, which can support graduate students but only on faculty-led research projects. We have many more graduate students doing excellent work on scholarly projects that they have conceived than we have resources to support them.

That is why we are pleased to announce a generous lead gift that opens the RRCHNM Alumni and Friends Fellowship Endowment. Three longtime friends and supporters of RRCHNM—Gary Kornblith, Carol Lasser, and Simon Kornblith—have made a very generous pledge of $50,000 to open the campaign. Their gift makes substantial progress towards our goal of raising $250,000 in endowed funds for this new fellowship.

When the endowment is fully funded, it will provide an annual fellowship to graduate students working at RRCHNM. Those students will have dedicated time—mentored by RRCHNM’s faculty and taking advantage of RRCHNM’s platforms—to pursue historical research using digital media. Graduate students at RRCHNM have used such funding to create maps of the people enslaved by George Mason III, to do a computational analysis of Congressional roll call votes about foreign policy, and to understand networks of working class leisure in boxing clubs in Chile. Every year, graduate students at RRCHNM come up with truly innovative ideas, and funding their work means they can finish that scholarship, publish articles and websites, and create born-digital dissertations

Since the generous lead gift (and even before the campaign has been announced) RRCHNM has received more than $5,000 in additional pledges in support of this endowment. We hope if you’re reading this that you consider yourself a friend of the center. Maybe you yourself were once a graduate student, looking for opportunities to develop your research ideas. Maybe you taught graduate students, or were one of our staff members who collaborated with them in their academic endeavors. However you connected with RRCHNM over the past thirty years, hopefully you can see the value in endowing this fellowship to support graduate students in the years to come.

Please consider making a gift or pledge to the endowment via this link. If you would like to discuss a pledge further, please reach out to RRCHNM’s executive director, Lincoln Mullen (lmullen@gmu.edu).