Horowitz Foundation Marks 20th Year of Social Science Grants
Irving Louis Horowitz in 1968 (Photo: Horowitz Foundation)
This marks the 20th year that the Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy has been passing out grants to social scientists, and the deadline to apply for this year’s round of $7,500 grants is December 1.
As the foundation’s website explains, the general purpose of the organization “is to support the advancement of research and understanding in the major fields of the social sciences. Its specific purpose is to provide small grants to aspiring PhD students at the dissertation level to support the research they are undertaking for their project.”
Last year’s cycle saw 20 individual scholars awarded grants for their projects.
The late sociologist Irving Louis Horowitz and Mary E. Curtis, his wife, established the foundation as a result of Horowitz’s experiences working with doctoral students who found it financially difficult to complete their research. Horowitz often supported them out of his own pocket, and later from the Transaction Publishers’ Grants-in-Publication Program, Transaction being a social science publisher he, Alvin W. Gouldner and Lee Rainwater had established in 1973. In 1997, when Horowitz stepped down as president of Transaction and Curtis took over as president, they switched their charitable efforts to the newly founded foundation.
Horowitz, a student of C. Wright Mills, was a well-regarded radical and humanistic sociologist known for things as varied from popularizing the term “Third World” to being a an expert on state-sponsored violence to seeing the public’s perception of his politics shift from the academic left to the neocon right. He served as Hannah Arendt University Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Political Science at Rutgers University from 1992 until his death in 2012, and in that period published his seminal text, The Decomposition of Sociology, in 1994.
Each grant is worth a total of $7,500; $5,000 awarded initially and $2,500 upon completion of the project. Special awards, given for outstanding work in specific disciplinary areas, are worth an additional $1,500. Grant recipients will be announced in June 2018.
For more information about applying, click HERE.
