The Council’s International Dissertation Research Fellowship (IDRF) is proud to announce the 2021 cohort of IDRF fellows. Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the SSRC IDRF program offers six to twelve months of support to graduate students in the humanities and humanistic social sciences who are currently enrolled in PhD programs in the United States and conducting dissertation research on non-US or US Indigenous cultures and societies. Since its inception in 1997, the IDRF program has funded more than sixteen hundred projects spanning the globe.

This year, 64 doctoral students have been chosen to receive fellowships to support their research. The cohort represents 13 disciplines and 11 world regions, from Africa and the Caribbean to East Asia and Latin America. The program is proud to announce that the 2021 cohort is the first to include projects focusing exclusively on US Indigenous cultures, and includes eight projects centered on US Indigenous communities such as Native Hawaiians and Alaska Natives.