What is the Fox International Fellowship?
The Fox International Fellowship is a graduate student exchange program between Yale and 19 world-renowned partner universities. Fox International Fellows are selected for their potential to become leaders in fields that are policy significant, historically informed, and socially meaningful. Such work is increasingly conditioned by the interdisciplinary and transnational character of knowledge and practice in the twenty-first century. Fellows’ research projects and academic interests reflect the areas toward which many of the world’s major decision-makers have gravitated, as well as those that have the potential to open new channels of debate.
Each Fox International Fellow receives robust support. In the short term, each Fox Fellow is expected to contribute to the academic and social life of the Fox exchange partner university. In the long term, each Fox Fellow is expected to have a positive impact upon the world and participate in national and international decision-making processes.
Fox International Fellows forge lasting links with their host institutions and peers from around the world. They gain a better understanding of their hosts by participating in cultural activities, deepening their abilities in the local languages, exploring and conducting fieldwork in the area surrounding their partner universities. Through the large, active Fox alumni network, Fellows continue to build relationships long after their work at their host institutions ends.
The Fox Fellowship, through scholarship and civic engagement, aims to enhance “mutual understanding” between the United States and the home countries of our partner universities in order to provoke and contribute to productive dialogue around complex challenges and to offer current and enduring solutions. Initiated at the end of the Cold War, the focus on peace and conflict in general and U.S./Soviet interaction has expanded to include a host of twenty-first century challenges in every world region such as prosperity and development, poverty alleviation, environmental degradation, resource stewardship, and human rights.
What do Fox International Fellows do?
Fox International Fellows undertake independent research in one of the focus fields for an academic year at one of the Fox exchange partner universities. They are doctoral students researching and writing their dissertations, or graduating masters students or graduating seniors who propose to work on a current project, an extension of a previous project, or suggest an entirely new avenue of enquiry. Fox International Fellows participate fully in the planned events and activities of the Fox Fellowship and become active member of the Fox alumni network. They are expected to report on their progress and activities throughout the year; and are often asked to present their research. Fellows also produce a Policy in Practice brief that translates their research into a digestible written piece for relevant stakeholders.
Like Yale University, all of the Fox exchange partner universities have excellent resources for research scholars and Fellows are encouraged to make optimal use of the faculty, libraries, and archives that they offer. Fellows often audit classes or attend workshops and conferences at their host university in order to become acquainted with the academics working in their field, to support them during their residency or in their subsequent work.
Fellows are expected to develop opportunities that foster the aims of the Fellowship, including making connections with local researchers, governments, non-governmental organizations, and charities that help generate new research questions and yield important practical experiences. In the past, Fellows have visited national archives and participated in conferences in their host nation.
Fellows in residence at Yale attend orientation and functions throughout the year with the Fox family and the broader Yale, New Haven, and Connecticut communities.
