Funding Opportunities: Global Religion Research Initiative

The Center for the Study of Religion and Society within the Department of Sociology at the University of Notre Dame is pleased to announce the launch of the Global Religion Research Initiative (GRRI), funded by the Templeton Religion Trust of Nassau, Bahamas.

The Global Religion Research Initiative (GRRI), a portfolio of six distinct competitive research and writing grants and fellowships programs to be awarded over the next three years that together intend to significantly advance the social scientific study of religions around the globe. The premise of the GRRI is that, as religion persists in significance in the contemporary, globalizing world, the social sciences in North America need much better to understand the diversity of religions and to integrate that enhanced understanding into research, theory, and teaching.

The GRRI offers a variety of competitive funding opportunities to scholars at all stages of their careers designed to realize those scholarly ends.

The initiative is dedicated to supporting the study of religion in global perspective in order to address two weaknesses in contemporary scholarship, namely the neglect of religion as a subject of study in the social sciences and relative neglect of religions outside of the North Atlantic region.
The GRRI project has two main aims.
1) To broaden the current study of religion beyond the North American and European contexts to the global study of religion, allowing for a more thorough understanding of the role of religion in the lives of individuals and societies worldwide.
2) To reinvigorate an interest in religion as a viable topic of academic inquiry.

The GRRI seeks to realize these goals by providing scholars interested in pursuing questions related to the structure, practice, and influence of religions worldwide with resources to complete their work.

To match resources with talented scholars interested in studying religion, the GRRI will conduct three rounds of competitive funding, open to scholars (both faculty and graduate students) with a wide array of research interests from social science disciplines. University of Notre Dame undergraduate students interested in research on global religion can apply for the Notre Dame Undergraduate Research Fellowship program.

The first round of proposals will be accepted in Fall 2016 for funding for the 2017 — 2018 academic year, and the second and third rounds of funding will follow in subsequent years.

Through the work sponsored by GRRI, the empirical study and theoretical understanding of global religion will be significantly advanced and better integrated into mainstream social science disciplines, as well as infused into undergraduate and graduate training programs via a more thorough body of knowledge about global religious diversity.

As a result, multiple academic disciplines will benefit from the enhanced empirical study of religion from a much wider perspective than is current practice, religion scholars will have a much better understanding about how religion outside of North America can be studied, and to what ends, and future scholars will be motivated to pursue the study of global religion in their own work.

The six funding programs include:
1) Dissertation Fellowships
2) Postdoctoral Research Fellowhships
3) Curriculum Development Grants
4) Grants for International Collaboration
5) Grants for Project Launch
6) Grants for Book Leave

Selection Criteria

GRRI applications will be evaluated according to the following criteria. T
1) Focused on a contemporary religion or religions (or relatively recent cases, not on ancient, medieval, or early modern religions) in one of the following world regions:
        Asia, including East, Southeast, and South Asia
        The Middle East and Turkey
        Eastern Europe
        Africa
        Latin America
        The Caribbean
        Pacific Islands
 2) Empirical, not purely theoretical
3) Methodologically and analytically sound
4)  Well-grounded in and contributing to the development of important, discipline-appropriate theories and literatures
5)  Promising for producing the publication of a significant book and/or major journal articles
6) Promising in their ability to address issues of importance within and influence and help integrate the study of religion into the mainstream of their respective disciplines

For further information: http://grri.nd.edu/