| The British Academy’s International Fellowships are a flagship opportunity for early-career researchers anywhere in the world to come to the UK for two years to pursue their research in any area of the humanities and social sciences.
The Academy has been seeing growing demand for International Fellowships awards in recent years, which has placed increasing pressure on the success rate of the scheme.
In 2025, the success rate was 3.3 per cent. In that light, the Academy has decided to introduce a series of measures to help raise the success rate of the programme.
The Academy will be monitoring this situation going forward and may consider further changes for future rounds. In the meantime, the changes for this coming round are summarised below and the full call text is being published on our website today to enable applicants to prepare well in advance of the formal opening of the programme on 15 January next year.
- Applicant eligibility will move to 0-5 years post PhD. This is a change from 0-7 years post PhD. Career breaks, parental leave and other periods of leave outside of academia will still be discounted from this time period. The applicant must already be of postdoctoral status, ie have had their viva-voce, by the time the International Fellowships Final Awards Panel meets on the 1 June in the year of application.
- Applicants must hold a PhD from a non-UK institution. Applicants who hold a UK PhD are eligible for the British Academy’s Postdoctoral Fellowships scheme. Those with UK-based Masters will still be eligible to apply.
- Reduction in the number of applications per sponsor (ie UK host academic). The UK sponsor will now only be able to support one application per round.
- No longer require a statement from a nominated referee. There will no longer be a requirement to provide references as part of an International Fellowships application, bringing the scheme in line with all other Academy schemes.
If you have any questions about the changes to the scheme or your eligibility to apply under the new rules, please do get in touch with the International Department at the British Academy by emailing overseas@thebritishacademy.ac.uk |
