Things That Worked: Application for Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship

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Gooooooooood morning, afternoon, or evening, wherever you happen to be!

First: a reminder that I’m once again offering a special deal on paid annual subscriptions. From now until 7 July 2024, you can get 365 days of full access to all PBP posts, past and present, for just $40!

So if you’re looking for a way to support my work, or if your subscription has recently expired, this is the moment you’ve been waiting for!

Second: Thank you to everyone who responded to last week’s poll about super-nerdy satire! I’m going to take some time to reflect on whether I have the capacity to take this on in addition to everything else, but I have to say I’d love to create a space for academic satire on here.

And now, welcome back for another round of ‘Things That Worked’!

This time, I’m sharing an application I submitted for a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action (MSCA) Individual Fellowship, a six-figure grant that changed the course of my career and led to some of the best years of my working life as a researcher.

In addition, in the next installment of ‘Things That Worked’, I will share the feedback I received on the application, which was briefly waitlisted before the funding was awarded. This will hopefully give you a sense of how applications like this are evaluated by the European Commission, and what the perceived strengths and weaknesses of my own application were, according to the evaluators.

Why apply for this kind of grant?

As you might guess from the fact that this grant was awarded to a medievalist like myself, Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellowships are not just for people working in the sciences. They are grants intended to ‘support researchers’ careers and foster excellence in research’ by promoting mobility among researchers, who are given the chance to work at an institution in a country that is not their country of residence.

As the MSCA website will inform you, there are two types of MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships:

1. European Postdoctoral Fellowships. They are open to researchers moving within Europe or coming to Europe from another part of the world to pursue their research career. These fellowships take place in an EU Member State or Horizon Europe Associated Country and can last between 1 and 2 years. Researchers of any nationality can apply.

2. Global Postdoctoral Fellowships. They fund the mobility of researchers outside Europe. The fellowship lasts between 2 to 3 years, of which the first 1 to 2 years will be spent in a non-associated Third Country, followed by a mandatory return phase of 1 year to an organisation based in an EU Member State or Horizon Europe Associated Country. Only nationals or long-term residents of the EU Member States or Horizon Europe Associated Countries can apply.

The website has more detailed information regarding who is eligible to apply, but essentially: you need to have a PhD, you should be applying no more than 8 years after the award of that PhD, and you should be applying to work in a country other than the one you’ve resided in during the past 12 months.

What’s the application process like?

Applications for MSCA fellowships are not especially complicated, but they are extremely time-consuming:

• You need the support of a host institution. This means that many months before you actually submit the application, you need to contact an institution abroad and secure a commitment from them to host you, should you be awarded the funding. (Tip: Ideally, your host institution will have hosted MSCA fellows before—if they have this experience already, they’ll be able to make the application process go much more smoothly.)

• You need the support of a ‘supervisor’ at that host institution. This isn’t like the ‘supervisor’ of your PhD—it’s more like a mentor for your project who will give you on-site support and advice when you need it. You’ll need to contact them months ahead of time, too!

• You’ll need excellence, impact, and a plan. At least, these are the things you’ll need to convince the grant evaluators about!

• You’ll really want to take a class on how to write the application. I’m not kidding. Thankfully, there are usually regular workshops on how to write MSCA applications, and I strongly advise you to attend one!

• A Gantt chart is involved. If, like me, your first thought upon seeing the phrase ‘Gantt chart’ is ‘what the hell is that?’, don’t worry—you’ll find out soon enough….

What’s the fellowship like?

Folks, it was awesome. Definitely 16 of the best months in my entire career. I was at one of the top universities in the world, hosted by one of the most beautiful colleges in that university, and I was up to my eyeballs in manuscripts, early print editions, seminars, conferences, meet-ups, EVERYTHING. I hadn’t felt this galvanized since my visiting fellowship at the Australian Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (ARC CHE)—I felt like my brain was working at a much higher gear than ever before! I made such wonderful discoveries in my research (wonderful to me, anyway), and I published what I still consider the most important article of my career thanks to that research.

On the other hand, as I’ve written before, the mobility aspect was a major challenge at that stage of my personal life. I had a tiny person back in Geneva, and I was bouncing back and forth by plane every two weeks. So if there are tons of benefits to the mobility a MSCA fellowship offers, there are major challenges as well, and they should not be underestimated. It’s one of the reasons why, when I was awarded a major grant in Switzerland, I cut my beautiful MSCA fellowship short and came home at the end of 2019.

This turned out to be spectacularly good timing, because COVID arrived and the world fell apart a few months later. I still shudder when I imagine what it would have been like to be trapped in Oxford with my little family far away in Geneva during the pandemic lockdowns.

A successful grant application

Below is a link to the application I submitted for a MSCA Individual European Fellowship about 8 years ago: