Presbyterian Historical Society welcomes 2026 cohort of Fellows
Thanks to another successful #GivingTuesday campaign, four scholars are awarded $2,500 research and travel grants to assist in their studies
The Presbyterian Historical Society is pleased to award four Research Fellowship grants in 2026.
PHS’s Research Fellowship program, founded over two decades ago, awards travel grants of $2,500 for scholars, students and independent researchers who demonstrate a need to work in the Society’s collection for a minimum of one week and whose current place of residence is more than 75 miles from Philadelphia.
The funds necessary for this program are primarily donation-based, with the PHS Giving Tuesday campaign being the main vehicle for fundraising. The 2025 Global Day of Giving campaign was yet another year of success, with the Society reaching its goal of $10,000 — funds that are being used to provide much-needed financial support to the four scholars introduced below.
Doctoral student Abraham Akhter Murad of Kellogg College, University of Oxford, has been awarded a grant for the project “Within and Without: Christianity in Late Imperial Northwest India and Postcolonial Pakistan, 1870-1971.” Through his research, Murad hopes to explore how “Christian actors negotiated the themes and issues of colonial transformation, the reformulation and assertion of caste, economic crises, and violence.”
By utilizing archival resources at PHS, he aims to “further help understand conversion as a process rather than an act.” Among the collections he has pinpointed for engagement during his time in the Reading Room are the India-Pakistan Mission Records and the Mabell Sammons Hayes Papers; he has pinpointed specific records of note, like the Annual Report of the Forman Christian College and the Minutes of the 177th General Assembly of the United Presbyterian Church of North America (1958-1983).
Audrey Ann Thompson, Professor Emerita at the University of Utah, will be conducting research related to Barber Memorial Seminary for her project “New (Race) Women at Barber Memorial Seminary, 1900–1930.” She’s been awarded a travel grant to further her research on “how the girls and women … in the boarding school years explored the contours of ‘New Negro’ and ‘New Women’ identities in a setting that encouraged neither and yet to some degree enabled both.”
Thompson hopes to uncover letters, personal narratives, school publications, and other records that will illuminate the lesser-known history of BMS. She’ll be looking into the Robert Lee Maffett Papers, the Woman’s Executive Committee of Home Missions/Woman’s Board of Home Missions Records, and items like the 1897 Barber Memorial Seminary Catalog.
Kim Stevens Barker is an Associate Professor and Associate Dean of Academics and Educator Preparation at Augusta University. Her project title is “Beyond Benevolence: Francina E. H. Haines, Women’s Religious Authority, and a Decision that Shaped Black Education in the Post-Reconstruction South.” Barker’s research homes in on the life, work, and institutional influence of Francina (Frances) E. H. Haines, whose donation in 1886 enabled Lucy Craft Laney to establish her school for Black children, the Haines Institute.
“While Haines is acknowledged in Georgia’s public history and local lore, her role has been narrowly framed as that of a benevolent donor rather than as a woman exercising significant authority within a national religious organization whose quiet influence is still evident across the United States from Augusta, Georgia to Haines, Alaska,” Barker shares in her application. “By situating Haines within women’s religious networks and examining her actions through organizational archives rather than personal papers alone, the project reframes the founding of Haines Institute as the product of women’s institutional power, cross-racial advocacy, and strategic religious philanthropy.” Two of the collections Barker hopes to utilize are the American Sunday School Union Records and the Finks Family Papers.
Randall J. Stephens is a Professor of American and British Studies at the University of Oslo. He will be visiting the historical society in Philadelphia to conduct research for his project “The Dust Bowl in the American Religious Imagination.”
The environmental calamity that devastated the Great Plains in the 1930s “occurred in a region known for its evangelical prohibitionism, its churches dotting the landscape, and its public displays of religious devotion,” Stephens shares. “The Dust Bowl inspired popular apocalyptic theology,” he continues, “while it encouraged Christian agrarianism and new thinking about the interconnectedness of God, the land, and humankind.” Stephens is eager to evaluate the religious legacy of the Dust Bowl using sources from within PHS archives, including various minutes and session records, and items relating to the Country Life Movement “and the work of key Presbyterian and Congregational figures who fused concern for rural churches with conservation work and the social gospel,” like Warren Hugh Wilson.
Presbyterian Historical Society staff are eager to welcome the 2026 cohort of fellows into the archives.
If you are working on a research project that could be bolstered by the PHS archival holdings, consider applying for a 2027 research fellowship. The application deadline isn’t until March 1, 2027, so there is ample time to compile and submit your materials! Find everything you need to apply here. Not a researcher, but want to support PHS? Donate to the annual fund today.
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