Last verified: 15 August 2026
Do you need to have finished your PhD? No. Jesus College states that successful candidates are expected to be either graduate students, probably in the later stages of the research leading to a doctorate, or postdoctoral researchers who have recently been awarded one. Both routes are explicitly in scope.
That single point decides whether the rest of this is worth your September. Jesus College, Cambridge is offering two stipendiary Arts Research Fellowships, each normally tenable for three years from 1 October 2027, and applications close at 5pm on Wednesday 30 September 2026.
How the competition actually runs:
This is a two stage process, and the second stage arrives faster than people expect.
Stage one, closing 5pm on Wednesday 30 September 2026. You submit the application online, including a statement of research. Two referees’ reports must arrive by the same deadline. The College is explicit that incomplete applications will not be accepted, which makes your referees a hard dependency rather than a formality.
Stage two, November 2026. Shortlisted candidates are invited to upload a copy of their chosen written work, along with a 500 word statement on the importance of their current and proposed research. The particulars also ask candidates to keep their contact details current, which matters precisely because this invitation arrives with a short turnaround.
Written work is not required in September. It is required in November, from a shortlist, and if the work does not reach the College by the stated deadline the candidate is deemed to have withdrawn from the competition.
The practical implication is worth stating plainly: do not treat the November stage as a problem for later. You need your chosen written work in a state you would be content for external assessors to read, and you need it ready before you know whether you have been shortlisted.
The application system is at jrf.jesus.cam.ac.uk, which opened on Monday 3 August 2026. Registration lets you save an application, revisit and edit it before submitting, and check its status afterwards.
The 2,000 word statement, and the rule that catches people:
The statement of research is capped at 2,000 words and has to do two jobs: outline the work you would submit in support of your application, and set out the research you propose to pursue if elected.
The second job carries a requirement that quietly disqualifies otherwise strong applications. The College asks candidates to propose a new project, explicitly beyond revision of doctoral research. A statement that reads as “I will turn my thesis into a monograph” is answering a different question from the one asked.
This is a reasonable request once you see what a Research Fellowship is for. The College is not funding the completion of work you have already done. It is betting on what you do next, and the statement is the only evidence it has for that.
There is a second constraint, and it is the one that most often separates a shortlisted statement from a rejected one. The statement will be read by people outside your discipline as well as inside it, and it must be intelligible to scholars in other subjects. A Fellowship committee assessing candidates in Law, Theology, English, Education Studies, Modern Languages and Anglo Saxon, Norse and Celtic Studies cannot contain specialists in all of them. Your reader may be a brilliant scholar with no knowledge whatsoever of your subfield.
Who is eligible:
Applications are open to researchers in these disciplines within the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences:
- Anglo Saxon, Norse and Celtic Studies
- Education Studies
- English
- Law
- Modern Languages
- Theology
The College expects an excellent record of research in the chosen subject and the potential to pursue it at the highest level. Beyond subject and quality, the filters are about career stage:
- candidates should be graduate students in the later stages of doctoral research, or postdoctoral researchers who have recently been awarded a PhD
- candidates who have undertaken more than five years of full time research are unlikely to be considered
- the College is prepared to consider exceptions, and candidates have the opportunity to present a case for this during the application process
That exceptions clause is worth taking seriously rather than reading as boilerplate. Career paths in the humanities are rarely tidy, and if you are past five years because of caring responsibilities, illness, a career change into research, or part time study, the College has built a route for you to say so. What it will not do is guess. If you need the exception, make the case explicitly.
Also Check: CRI Irvington Postdoctoral Fellowship 2026 ($74,000 Stipend Per year)
Making the statement competitive:
Two fellowships, an international field, and 2,000 words to distinguish yourself. A few things follow from how the College has framed the task.
- Lead with the new project, not the thesis. Your doctoral work establishes that you can do research. The proposal establishes that you have somewhere to go. Give the new project the larger share of the word count.
- Write the first paragraph for a scholar in another discipline. Not simplified, but unpacked. If a specialist in Theology cannot tell what your Modern Languages project is asking after one paragraph, the statement is not doing its job.
- Name the intervention. What in your field changes if you are right? Fellowship committees are assessing potential, and potential is easier to see when the stakes are stated rather than implied.
- Brief your referees in August, not September. Reports must arrive by the same 5pm deadline as your application, and an application without them is incomplete. Send each referee the particulars, your statement, and the deadline in a single message.
- Choose your written work now. You will be asked for it in November at short notice, so decide in September which chapter or article you would want external assessors to read, and get it into a state you can stand behind.
- Do not leave the submission to the final afternoon. A 5pm closing time on a Wednesday means the portal shuts during a working day, and there is no grace period for a referee whose email arrives at 5:10pm.
What the Fellowship provides:
The package is unusually complete for an early career humanities post, and several parts of it are easy to overlook.
- Stipend. Set by reference to the University of Cambridge salary scale and subject to increases in that scale. Step 35, currently £32,882, is applied across the three years of the Fellowship.
- Bench fee. The College pays a fee of the order of £12,000 per year, subject to annual review, so that a Research Fellow can access University Department facilities. This is money that never passes through your account but removes a real barrier to doing the work.
- Accommodation. The College can assist with subsidised accommodation for Research Fellows, subject to availability.
- Dining. Free dinner, or lunch, for all Research Fellows, whether they live in College or out of it.
- Pension. Research Fellows may join the University’s Pension Scheme.
- University fees. The College is prepared, where appropriate, to contribute towards university fees. This one matters most to candidates elected while still completing a doctorate.
Read together, that is a salary, a research budget, subsidised housing, meals and a pension contribution for three years, in a college in Cambridge, at the stage of a humanities career when funding is hardest to find.
For a humanities researcher finishing a doctorate or just past it, a Cambridge Research Fellowship is among the best things that can happen to a career at that stage: three years of salary, a research budget, and time in which the only expectation is that you do excellent work.
Two posts across six subjects makes it genuinely competitive, and the deciding factor is usually not the thesis. It is whether the 2,000 word statement convinces a committee of non specialists that you have a compelling new project and the ability to carry it out.
Also Check: United Nations Nippon Foundation Fellowship 2027 (Funded Nine Month Placement)
Frequently asked questions:
How much written work do I submit, and does it have to be finished?
As a rough guide the College recommends that work sent to external assessors runs to no more than about 40,000 words, and it is explicit that it cares about quality rather than quantity. The work need not be in its final form, but it must provide evidence of outstanding originality and promise. In practice that means a strong unpublished chapter is a better choice than a longer but uneven selection, and polish matters less than the calibre of the thinking on the page.
Can I hold other paid work or another award during the Fellowship?
Not without permission. A Research Fellow is not permitted to undertake other paid work, or to hold other offices and awards, except by permission of the College Council. There is one built in exception: a Research Fellow may be invited to undertake a small amount of undergraduate teaching during Term. If you are counting on external income or already hold another award, raise it with the College rather than assuming it can run alongside.
Another college has offered me a Research Fellowship. What do I do?
Tell Jesus College. Candidates are required to notify the College if they accept a Research Fellowship elsewhere. Cambridge and Oxford college competitions run on overlapping timetables and it is common to be in more than one at once, so this is a normal situation rather than an awkward one. Handling it promptly and openly is simply how the system is designed to work.
Can I submit written work in a language other than English?
Normally the submitted work should be written in English. If you intend to submit work in another language you must give notice by indicating it on your application, in the field where you enter the title of the work. That is easy to miss, and it is the applicant’s responsibility rather than something the College will query later, so flag it at the point of application rather than in November.
Are international applicants eligible?
The further particulars set out subject, career stage and quality requirements, and say nothing about nationality, residence or visa status either way. That silence is not the same as an answer. If you would need permission to work in the United Kingdom from October 2027, ask the College directly before investing weeks in the application, and get the reply in writing.
