2025-'26 External Fellowships
Center of the American West
Student Research Fellowship (2025-'26)
**Paid Fellowship and Mentorship Opportunity — Seeking undergraduate and graduate students**
For the 2025-26 academic year, the fellowship will focus on Japanese American incarceration in the American West. This opportunity is the brainchild of Eddie Seo, an Angeleno who was incarcerated along with other family members at the War Relocation Authority’s camp at Heart Mountain, Wyoming. Inspired to promote greater awareness of this rich, controversial, and still exceedingly painful subject, Seo also wanted to honor Lane Ryō Hirabayashi. Hirabayashi, a former faculty member at CU-Boulder’s Department of Ethnic Studies, was a pioneering scholar of Japanese American incarceration. Lane was also a nephew of Gordon Hirabayashi, who continued to exercise his rights as a U.S. citizen by fighting his arrest through legal challenges. In 1943, however, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of Japanese American incarceration in Hirabayashi v. U.S., which the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit finally vacated in the 1980s in response to decades of activism by the Hirabayashis and many other Japanese Americans who organized to seek redress from the federal government for the injustices prompted by Roosevelt’s order.
Key Details:
Graduate students and undergraduates are both eligible to apply. Applications must include the following materials:
1. Resume/CV (one or two pages, including a list of relevant coursework at the university level, if any)
2. Cover letter in which you explain your reasons for wishing to participate as well as relevant courses and other experiences, if any
3. List of two or three references, with contact information (at least one reference should be from a university-level instructor who has some familiarity with your academic skills and preparation)
Students selected to participate in this selective program will choose a more specific area of study within this larger theme. Drawing on the questions above, this area of focus will enable students to conduct original research that illuminates lesser-known histories and experiences relating to the war-time confinement of Japanese Americans. It will also provide a forum in which students can discuss and develop their findings, culminating in a presentation, paper, teaching curriculum, or piece of creative work inspired and informed by their research. Each student chosen to serve as a Seo/Hirabayashi Fellow will receive a stipend of $1,500 as well as access to up to $1,000 of research funding.
Email application: to Center of the American West Academic Programs Coordinator, Ryan Lueck atryan.lueck@colorado.edu or for questions regarding the program.