CHARLOTTE W. NEWCOMBE DOCTORAL DISSERTATION FELLOWSHIP APPLICANT GUIDEBOOK
How to prepare a strong application
JULY 6, 2026
CHARLOTTE W. NEWCOMBE FOUNDATION 35 Park Place, Princeton, NJ 08542-6918

Welcome

The Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship supports doctoral dissertations in the humanities and social sciences that engage questions of religion, ethics, values, or morals.

The first section in this guide is intended to help prospective applicants understand the Fellowship’s mission and determine whether their project is a strong fit. The second section, Preparing the Application follows the structure of the application. As you move through each section of the online application, you will find corresponding guidance explaining the purpose of the section, what reviewers are trying to learn, and how to approach your response.

The application process is designed to help reviewers answer a small number of important questions: What is the dissertation about? How central are questions of religion, ethics, values, or morals to the project? What substantive intellectual work remains to be completed during the fellowship year? Is the applicant well-positioned to carry that work forward?

The sections that follow explain not only what information the application requests, but why those questions are being asked. Throughout the guidebook, I will discuss common sources of confusion, explain how particular application materials are used in the review process, and offer suggestions for presenting your work clearly to an interdisciplinary audience.

My goal is not to help applicants tailor their projects to fit the Fellowship. Rather, it is to help applicants understand what the Fellowship seeks to support so they can determine whether Newcombe is the right fit for their work and present that work as clearly as possible.

Is my project a fit? What is Newcombe looking for? How should I present my work? This guidebook seeks to answer these questions clearly enough to help you confidently prepare your application.

Wishing you all the best in your application process,
Susan Billmaier, PhD
Program Officer, the Newcombe Fellowship

The Newcombe Fellowship

The Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship supports doctoral students in the humanities and social sciences whose dissertations engage questions of religion, ethics, values, or morals. The Fellowship is not organized around a particular discipline, methodology, ideological perspective, or set of conclusions. Rather, it is organized around a particular kind of question.

Questions of religion, ethics, values, and morals arise in many forms. They may concern justice, obligation, responsibility, human flourishing, religious belief and practice, political life, professional ethics, moral conflict, social institutions, or the values that shape individual and collective decision-making. Newcombe-supported projects approach these and related questions through the methods and standards of scholarly inquiry.

The Fellowship does not seek to identify the “best” dissertations in a general sense. Many outstanding dissertations fall outside its scope. Instead, Newcombe seeks to support excellent projects for which questions of religion, ethics, values, or morals are among the central organizing concerns of the work.

Understanding this distinction is one of the most important steps in determining whether Newcombe is the right fit for your project.

Before You Begin

Before beginning an application, it may be helpful to consider three questions.

First, are questions of religion, ethics, values, or morals among the central organizing concerns of your dissertation? Newcombe supports a particular kind of scholarly inquiry. The Fellowship welcomes a wide range of disciplinary approaches and does not require applicants to advance normative arguments or advocate particular moral positions. Rather, the central questions of the dissertation should meaningfully engage issues of religion, ethics, values, or morals. Fit should not be confused with quality. A project may be outstanding and still not align closely with the Fellowship’s mission or stage-of-dissertation expectations.

Second, will you be engaged in substantial dissertation writing during the fellowship year? The Fellowship is intended to support meaningful intellectual production rather than a dissertation that is already substantially complete.

Applicants who can answer “yes” to these questions will likely find the sections that follow helpful in preparing a strong application.

What Is the Fellowship Year Intended to Support?

The Newcombe Fellowship is intended to support a year of substantive dissertation writing. The Fellowship year begins the September following the selection of Fellows.

Applicants often think about dissertation progress in terms of completion dates, graduation deadlines, or administrative milestones. While those considerations matter, they are not the primary focus of the Fellowship. Newcombe is fundamentally interested in supporting intellectual work.

For this reason, reviewers are less concerned with when a dissertation will be finished than with what remains to be done. A project scheduled for completion in August of the Fellowship year may be a stronger fit than a project scheduled for completion in May, if the later project involves substantially more writing during the fellowship year.

The Fellowship is designed to support projects that still require meaningful intellectual production. This may include drafting dissertation chapters, developing major portions of the argument, integrating research into written form, or completing other substantial writing necessary to bring the project to completion.

A strong application demonstrates a clear relationship between the work remaining and the year of support being requested. Reviewers are not looking for perfectly predictable schedules. They are trying to understand how the Fellowship year will be used and whether it will support significant progress toward completion.

Understanding the Two-Phase Application Process

The Newcombe Fellowship application process is designed to answer different questions at different stages of review. As a result, the application is divided into two phases.

Phase 1 is intended to identify projects that merit deeper consideration. Reviewers focus on the dissertation’s central question, its engagement with religion, ethics, values, or morals, the applicant’s preparation for the work, and the amount of substantive writing that remains to be completed during the fellowship year. The goal at this stage is not to make final funding decisions, but to identify the strongest candidates for further review.

Applicants selected as finalists advance to Phase 2. At that stage, reviewers examine projects in greater depth through additional materials and a more detailed assessment process. Finalist review allows the Fellowship to move beyond initial questions of fit and feasibility and engage more fully with the project’s scholarly contribution.

Understanding this structure may help applicants approach Phase 1 more effectively. The purpose of the initial application is not to provide every possible detail about the dissertation. Rather, it is to present a clear picture of the project, its relationship to the Fellowship’s mission, and the substantive work that remains to be completed.

What Kind of Work Does Newcombe Support?

One of the most common questions prospective applicants ask is whether their project is a “Newcombe project.” The answer depends less on discipline, methodology, or topic than on the role questions of religion, ethics, values, or morals play within the dissertation itself.

The Fellowship supports a wide range of scholarly approaches. Some applicants engage explicitly normative questions about justice, obligation, responsibility, or human flourishing. Others examine religious communities, moral traditions, ethical conflicts, value formation, institutional norms, or the ways individuals and societies navigate questions of meaning and purpose. The project may be descriptive, interpretive, historical, ethnographic, or analytical without itself being a normative intervention. What unites these projects is not a shared method or conclusion, but a sustained engagement with questions of religion, ethics, values, or morals.

Importantly, Newcombe does not require applicants to make normative arguments or advocate particular moral positions. Historical, interpretive, ethnographic, sociological, literary, and other forms of scholarship may be highly competitive. The question is not whether a dissertation is normative in method. The question is whether questions of religion, ethics, values, or morals are among the central organizing concerns of the inquiry. The most successful Newcombe applications are not necessarily those that describe the most ambitious or influential projects. They are the applications that clearly demonstrate why the dissertation belongs within the particular conversation that the Fellowship was created to support.

Centrality Versus Presence

Applicants sometimes assume that any dissertation containing an ethical, religious, or values-related dimension is a strong fit for the Fellowship. In practice, the more important question is how those concerns function within the project as a whole. They may appear as one theme among several, emerge in a single chapter, or arise as an implication of the research. Newcombe reviewers are not simply looking for the presence of such questions. They are trying to understand whether those questions are among the central organizing concerns of the dissertation.

One way to think about this distinction is to ask whether the project would remain fundamentally the same if questions of religion, ethics, values, or morals were removed from the analysis. If the answer is yes, the project may engage such questions without being organized around them. If the answer is no, the project may be a strong fit for Newcombe.

This distinction matters because Newcombe supports inquiry into questions of religion, ethics, values, and morals wherever those questions arise and however they are studied. It is designed to support inquiry into a particular set of enduring human questions. Those questions often exceed the boundaries of any single field and frequently shape conversations within public life, institutions, professions, communities, and religious traditions. Newcombe-supported scholarship contributes to those conversations by helping people and scholars better understand the values, beliefs, commitments, and moral questions that shape human experience.

For this reason, applicants should focus not only on where questions of religion, ethics, values, or morals appear in their dissertation, but on the role those questions play in the project’s central aims, arguments, and contributions.

Why Interdisciplinary Readability Matters

Newcombe Fellows come from a wide range of disciplines across the humanities and qualitative social sciences. Most Newcombe Fellows operate within established disciplinary traditions fields. While interdisciplinary projects are welcome and have become increasingly common in recent years, applicants should not assume that interdisciplinarity is expected or preferred.

At the same time, applicants should be able to explain their work clearly to thoughtful readers outside their immediate area of specialization. This expectation reflects the nature of the Fellowship itself. Newcombe reviewers come from different disciplines, intellectual traditions, and areas of expertise. A strong application helps those readers understand not only what the dissertation studies, but why the questions it raises matter.

This is particularly important because the questions that animate Newcombe-supported scholarship often extend beyond the boundaries of a single field. Questions of religion, ethics, values, and morals arise in many different contexts and frequently intersect with broader conversations about institutions, communities, professional practice, public life, and human experience. They are not static or exhaustive questions, nor are they confined to any one discipline.

Applicants should not assume that accessibility requires simplification. Rather, the goal is clarity. A strong application enables an educated reader outside the field to understand the project’s central question, its significance, and its contribution without requiring specialized disciplinary knowledge.

Eligible Degrees and Fields

The Fellowship is designed to support scholarly research leading to the Ph.D. and equivalent research doctorates. This focus reflects the Fellowship’s purpose rather than a judgment about the value of other forms of doctoral education.

Degrees such as the J.D., Ed.D., Psy.D., D.Min., and similar professional doctorates are typically designed to prepare practitioners, educators, clinicians, ministers, and other professionals for leadership within their fields. While these degrees often involve substantial intellectual work, they generally serve different educational and professional goals than research-oriented doctoral programs. For this reason, the Fellowship is limited to applicants pursuing research doctorates.

Most Newcombe Fellows come from the humanities and qualitative social sciences, including fields such as Religious Studies, Philosophy, History, Anthropology, Political Science, Sociology, Literature, and related disciplines. However, eligibility is determined by the dissertation rather than the department. Applicants from interdisciplinary programs and, in rare cases, STEM fields are welcome to apply when questions of religion, ethics, values, or morals are among the central organizing concerns of the project.

Similarly, the Fellowship does not prescribe a particular research methodology. Historical, philosophical, ethnographic, interpretive, theoretical, qualitative, and other humanistic approaches are all appropriate. Although many successful projects employ qualitative methods, the Fellowship does not distinguish between qualitative and quantitative research as a matter of policy. Rather, reviewers consider whether the dissertation engages deeply with questions of religion, ethics, values, or morals in ways that contribute meaningfully to humanistic scholarship.

Applicants whose fields fall near the boundaries of eligibility should pay particular attention to how they describe their projects. The most important question is usually What questions is this dissertation asking? Projects that merely mention ethics, values, or religion, or treat them as secondary applications of another research question, are generally not competitive. By contrast, projects from a wide range of disciplines may be excellent fits when these questions are among the dissertation’s central organizing concerns.

Projects that fall outside the Fellowship’s scope often do so not because of their discipline, but because of the questions they seek to answer. For example, a study evaluating the effectiveness of AI tools in the classroom, developing STEM curricula, modeling public health outcomes, or measuring patterns of religious affiliation may be excellent scholarship, yet its primary contribution is likely methodological, technical, or descriptive rather than an inquiry into questions of religion, ethics, values, or morals. Likewise, clinical studies evaluating treatment outcomes typically fall outside the Fellowship’s mission because they are designed to assess therapeutic effectiveness rather than to investigate the humanistic or normative questions surrounding those subjects. The Fellowship is intended to support dissertations in which questions of religion, ethics, values, or morals are not simply present, but constitute a central focus of the scholarly inquiry.

Normative Questions and Non-Normative Methods

Questions of religion, ethics, values, and morals can be investigated in many different ways. A philosopher may develop a normative argument about justice or obligation. A historian may examine how moral ideas shaped a particular period. An anthropologist may study how communities negotiate ethical commitments in everyday life. A sociologist may investigate the formation of values within institutions. A scholar of religion may explore how beliefs and practices influence individual and collective action.

What unites these projects is not a shared method. It is a shared engagement with questions that concern religion, ethics, values, or morals.

• What is the ethical problem?
• Why does it matter?
• What tensions are present?
• What values are in conflict?
• What is at stake for individuals, communities, institutions, or society?
• What understanding, intervention, or possibility emerges from the work?

For this reason, applicants should not assume that a dissertation must advocate a particular position, resolve a moral debate, or offer a normative prescription in order to be competitive. The project may be descriptive, interpretive, historical, ethnographic, analytical, or theoretical without itself being a normative intervention.

The more important question is whether the dissertation illuminates questions of religion, ethics, values, or morals in a way that helps us better understand what is at stake. The strongest projects do more than identify the presence of values or moral commitments. They help clarify their significance, complexity, consequences, tensions, possibilities, or implications.