Newberry Library Competition

Funds are available for KU graduate students and faculty to participate in the Newberry Library's Center for Renaissance Studies programs or to conduct research in all collections at the Newberry. By a reciprocal arrangement, KU graduate students and faculty also may participate in Folger Institute programs or conduct research at the Folger Library.

Part of KU’s dues to the Newberry’s Center for Renaissance Studies Consortium helps fund programming and part is available as $550 travel stipends for KU faculty and graduate students to travel to the Newberry or Folger to attend programs or conduct research. 

If you have been accepted to a program at the Newberry or Folger, please submit a copy of your acceptance email along with the dates of your travel to the Newberry as your application for a travel stipend. If you plan to conduct research at either the Newberry or the Folger, please submit a brief plan for your research. The plan should explain why you need to consult the materials in person. If you are a graduate student applying for a stipend to conduct research, in addition to your brief research plan, please ask your advisor to submit a brief endorsement of your research plan. This endorsement should not be a letter of recommendation; a couple of lines to indicate the graduate student’s status in the program and the importance of the Newberry or Folger’s holdings for the student’s project and/or professional development is sufficient. Please submit all materials by e-mail to Patricia Manning (pwmannin@ku.edu).

The funding for KU’s participation in the Newberry consortium is provided by the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the Hall Center for the Humanities, the Departments of French, Italian and Francophone Studies, English, History, Spanish and Portuguese, and the Kress Foundation Department of Art History. Members of the KU Newberry Library Consortium Committee are Patricia Manning (chair); Brent Metz (secretary); Luis Corteguera; Misty Schieberle.

The Newberry Library, located on the near north side of Chicago, owns an eclectic collection of rare materials. Its collections of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts and printed books include two thousand incunables, along with holdings in the humanities, philology, and historiography, French political pamphlets (1560-1649), the history of printing, and European colonization in the Americas. The Newberry’s unique materials relating to Chicago history are another strength of the library’s collection. See the Newberry’s guide to searching their holdings HERE.

The Newberry Library Center for Renaissance Studies, founded in 1979, offers a wide range of programs at the graduate and postdoctoral levels, including intensive training in the techniques (i.e., paleography, bibliography, codicology, textual editing) essential for primary research in these fields; interdisciplinary seminars; workshops; and conferences. The Center also provides a locus for a lively community of scholars who come from all over the world to use the Library's collections of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts and printed materials.

In addition to lectures and conferences, the Center for Renaissance Studies offers consortium seminars during the academic year. These courses permit an instructor to direct an advanced seminar in his or her area of specialization by drawing from a larger pool of participants than may be available on a single campus, and they serve as a first-hand introduction to the Newberry's holdings of manuscripts and early editions in areas of its special strengths. Center for Renaissance Studies seminars are conducted as symposia for scholars with common interests and goals, rather than as formal courses, and each participant is encouraged to develop his or her own research interests within the limits, broadly interpreted, of the general topic designated by the seminar leader. Graduate students taking a course for credit should make arrangements with their own institutions. Funds are available for KU faculty and graduate students to participate in all Center programs.

The Center for Renaissance Studies collaborates with the Folger Institute in Washington, D.C. By a reciprocal arrangement, faculty members and graduate students from either consortium are eligible to participate in programs offered by the other.

For additional and ongoing information, visit the Newberry Library’s Center for Renaissance Studies website.

More information about the Folger Library Institute can be found at the Folger Library website.