The AHA regrets to inform members that it will not be feasible to offer the ECR Fellowship for the 2025 academic year. Established in the midst of the COVID-10 pandemic, our ECR Fellowship was intended to ameliorate the grievous lack of postdoctoral fellowship opportunities available to historians in Australia. Initially, the goal was to provide the Fellowship as something akin to a stipend (valued at $11,000), funded by general donations to the AHA Public Fund. However, we have not been able to procure the necessary volume of donations to make the Fellowship feasible in that form.
The AHA Executive Committee is seeking to place the ECR Fellowship on a more sustainable footing for the period 2026 onwards. In order to do this, we anticipate reducing the value of the ECR Fellowship to $5,000 per annum, which would make it roughly equivalent with the existing Allan Martin Award (funded by a bequest at the Australian National University). We intend to offer both Awards to the AHA’s early career members each year, and we hope that the smaller iteration of the ECR Fellowship will make our donation targets more achievable in the near and medium term. We strongly encourage those who are able to donate to consider making a small contribution to the Public Fund in support of the ECR Fellowship and our other Public Funded prizes. Please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us if you have any questions or queries about this one.