Fellowships & Awards
Each year, the Melville Society offers the Walter E. Bezanson Archive Fellowship, the Hennig Cohen Prize, and Conference Travel Grants.
The Hennig Cohen Prize
Since 1998, the Melville Society has honored the memory of Professor Hennig Cohen with an annual award for the best article, book chapter, or essay in a book about Herman Melville. In addition to his founding roles in the American Studies Association, American Quarterly, and the Melville Society, the late Hennig Cohen (1919-96) was a dedicated teacher, scholar, and modern editor of Herman Melville's works.
Learn more
The 2022 Hennig Cohen Prize has been awarded to Justina Torrance for her essay, “Melville’s Milton: Of the Devil’s Party and Knows It," published in A New Companion to Herman Melville, edited by Wyn Kelley and Christopher Ohge (Blackwell).
Conference Travel Grants
We will award at least four travel grants to help defray travel costs, lodging, and other expenses for conference participants with limited travel funding available, in order to enable them to present their work at our international conferences. Grant recipients will receive $300 stipends and have their conference registration fees waived.
These awards have been designed to support contingent faculty, graduate students with limited access to travel funding, scholars who are not otherwise able to afford international travel, or others for whom travel to the conference would present significant financial hardship. We will evaluate applications by considering both need and the quality of your paper proposal, with priority given to early-career scholars and people who would most benefit from participation in the Melville Society at this point in your professional lives. You are welcome to apply as soon as your conference proposal has been formally accepted.
To apply please send the following materials: (1) a statement of up to 500 words that outlines the reasons that attending our conference would be especially beneficial at this point in your career, (2) an abstract of your accepted conference paper, your workshop proposal, or an equivalent document, and (3) your current vita. Please send your materials to the awards committee (melvillesocietytravelawards@gmail.com) as a single PDF document. Applicants who have not received Melville Society travel grants in the past will be prioritized.
Applications for the next international conference are not yet open.
Walter E. Bezanson Archive Fellowship
The Melville Society, under the auspices of the Melville Society Cultural Project in New Bedford, offers an annual Walter E. Bezanson Fellowship to help a scholar undertake research on Herman Melville at the Society’s Archive in the Research Library of the Whaling Museum in New Bedford, Massachusetts. International scholars at the dissertation stage are especially encouraged to apply.
