The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide seeks early-career scholars for its Genocide and Atrocity Prevention Research Fellowship. The fellowship will provide support for policy-relevant research on the prevention or mitigation of mass atrocities.
We are now accepting applications for our 2027–28 Genocide and Atrocity Prevention Fellowship, which will run from June 1, 2027, through May 31, 2028.
Background
The Museum teaches that the Holocaust was preventable and that by heeding warning signs and taking early action, individuals and governments can save lives. The Founding Chairman of the Museum, Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, hoped the Museum would do for victims of genocide today what was not done for the Jews of Europe during the Holocaust.
The Simon-Skjodt Center is dedicated to advancing research and education focused on understanding warning signs, analyzing lessons learned from past cases, and providing in-depth reports on countries where crimes are ongoing or at serious risk, and that are receiving insufficient governmental or public attention.
One of the Simon-Skjodt Center’s strategic goals is to address gaps in policy-relevant knowledge on atrocity prevention, including by conducting, commissioning, and encouraging others to conduct timely and high-quality research.
Fellowship Description
Research on the prevention of mass atrocities is growing, yet policy makers continue to confront limits to our knowledge about how to address risks of large-scale, systematic violence against civilian populations, particularly cases likely to lead to group-targeted violence or genocide. The Simon-Skjodt Center has conducted a systematic review of three-plus decades of research on 15 types of policy action, or tools, sometimes used to help prevent mass atrocities.
We found that existing research leaves significant gaps on certain topics of great interest to policy makers; methodological and data availability obstacles make it difficult for any study to measure the causal impact of preventive actions; and the use of different concepts and definitions, methods, and levels of analysis makes it difficult to synthesize evidence across multiple studies. In 2024, we published an article in the journal Genocide Studies and Prevention that summarizes these conclusions.
In the executive summary for the project’s initial release, we concluded that “more of the same will not address policy needs” for research about atrocity prevention. We recommended that researchers “work to develop a 10-year collaborative research program to help fill critical gaps in policy-relevant knowledge.”
The Fellowship aims to increase policy-relevant knowledge about genocide, mass atrocities, and their prevention by providing direct support to early-career scholars.
Requirements and Compensation
Fellowships will support new or ongoing, original research projects on three main topics:
Current trends in genocide and mass atrocities, such as the scale, perpetrators, targets, or tactics associated with these forms of group-targeted, identity-based violence;
Local and international action to prevent genocide and mass atrocities and protect civilians, including early warning; and
The intersection between these topics and “cross-cutting” themes, such as new technologies, transnational social movements, and climate change.
Fellows will be required to participate in at least two workshops, at least one of which will be in-person in Washington, DC. During the in-person workshop, fellows will present their research in progress and receive feedback from an interdisciplinary advisory group of senior scholars, as well as Simon-Skjodt Center staff, other fellows, and seminar participants.
The Museum will provide fellows a financial award ($20,000 for those currently pursuing a PhD, $30,000 for those who have received a PhD or equivalent research degree within the last five years) and cover travel-related expenses for fellows’ participation in a workshop in Washington, DC. The fellowship is non-residential.
Application Guidelines
Applications must be received no later than 11:59 p.m. Eastern time on December 13, 2026. We expect to review the applications and notify all applicants of the outcome by the end of March 2026.
Applications must be submitted in English via our online application and consist of the following:
An online application form
A project proposal (in PDF format, not to exceed 1,300 words)
A curriculum vitae summary (in PDF format, not to exceed four single-spaced pages)
Contact information for two professional references, including a member of your dissertation committee or other close academic advisor
Project proposals should include the following information:
The research question or topic that the project examines;
How the project addresses gaps in policy-relevant knowledge about genocide, mass atrocities, and their prevention, including potential policy applications of the proposed research;
The data sources and analytic methods that the project employs;
How the applicant will use the fellowship to advance their research, including a timeline;
How the fellowship will advance the applicant’s professional and academic goals
How We Assess Applications
Applicants will be assessed according to five main criteria:
intellectual merit of the proposed project;
applicant’s ability to conduct the proposed research and complete the project;
potential to help fill major gaps in policy-relevant knowledge on atrocity prevention;
expected impact of the fellowship on the applicant’s long-term research agenda; and
relevance to international policy and practice of atrocity prevention.
We may also assess how the applicant’s proposal aligns with the Simon-Skjodt Center’s ongoing focus areas, including specific countries that have been the focus of our research and education work. Applicants should include citations to relevant scholarly research throughout their applications.
Applicants should not use tools that rely on large-language models (LLMs) to draft any part of their proposals. In the application form, we ask applicants to disclose any other use of LLMs or similar tools in preparing their proposals.
At the time of their application, applicants must be enrolled in a PhD program (pre-docs) or within five years of receiving a PhD (post-PhD) from an accredited university. We welcome proposals from any relevant academic discipline as well as inter-/trans-disciplinary approaches, and encourage submissions from applicants who are based in any location, including those who are based outside of the United States and Europe.
The Museum is an Equal Opportunity Employer. Applications from all qualified individuals will be considered without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, genetic information, or any other protected status.
Contact Information
For further information, please contact scpgresearch@ushmm.org.