My graduate students and younger colleagues have sometimes asked me to share examples of successful fellowship and grant applications. Below you will find the "Career Narrative" which formed part of my application for a Guggenheim Fellowship. I also include several recent grant proposals to the National Science Foundation. Writing a single-spaced, 15 page proposal is at least as demanding as preparing a paper for submission to a major journal.
Career Narrative for Guggenheim Fellowship Application
I have a tin can on my desk that I bought in Budapest in the autumn of 1989. It's considerably smaller than your standard tuna can and extremely light in weight. If you tap your fingernail on it, it gives a hollow ring. But the label, complete with a universal bar code, announces in bold letters that, in fact, it's not empty: "Kommunizmus Utolso Lehelet" − "The Last Breath of Communism." I used this device to organize my application for a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, which I was awarded in 2002.
NSF Grant Application: Pathways of Property Transformation
This is a grant proposal submitted to the National Science Foundation on August 15, 2001. Data collection and analysis supported by this grant resulted in the paper, "Social Times of Network Spaces," co-authored with Balazs Vedres that appeared in the American Journal of Sociology in 2006.
NSF Grant Application: network dynamics of an emerging democracy
This is a grant proposal that Balazs Vedres and I submitted to the National Science Foundation in January 2006. The project analyzes the interactions of firms and parties across an entire epoch of economic and political transformation from 1987 to 2006 in a case where market-oriented enterprises and competitive political parties emerged in tandem. Research supported by this grant led to our paper, "Structural Folds," that appeared in the American Journal of Sociology in 2010.