Summer Institute on Conducting Archival Research for Graduate Students

CWIHP announces a call for applications to participate in a Summer Institute on Conducting Archival Research (June 4-5, 2003), hosted and sponsored by the George Washington University Cold War Group in cooperation with CWIHP and the National Security Archive.

Ph.D. students from any discipline working on dissertations involving archival research on Cold War topics are invited to apply to participate in a two-day Summer Institute on Conducting Archival Research at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C.

Summer Institute Goals

The Summer Institute will train graduate students to get the most out of their time conducting research in archives. There will be sessions on how to prepare to go to an archive, how to structure time in the archives, understanding how archival documents come to be written and deposited in archives, the challenges of interpreting archival documents, issues of culture and language in working in foreign archives, and how to search for information not in the archives, such as consulting private papers, making Freedom of Information Act requests for still classified documents, and conducting oral history interviews. Summer Institute participants will be actively involved in reading archival documents (in English translation) provided to them during the sessions and discussing their interpretation.

Summer Institute Faculty

The Summer Institute will be directed by the faculty of the GW Cold War Group (including Gregg Brazinsky, James Goldgeier, Hope M. Harrison, and James G. Hershberg) and scholars at both the National Security Archive (including Thomas Blanton, William Burr, Malcolm Byrne, and Svetlana Savranskaya) and the Cold War International History Project (including Christian Ostermann).

Applying to the Summer Institute
The Summer Institute will be limited to 25 participants. Applicants must submit the application form (see below, or download from http://ieres.org), a two-page proposal indicating how they would benefit from participation in the Summer Institute on Conducting Archival Research, a curriculum vitae, and one letter of recommendation from a faculty member in their department. Applications are due by February 3, 2003, and decisions will be announced by March 3, 2003.

Applicants are expected to obtain travel costs from their home department, and GW will cover their housing and meals during the Institute. This Summer Institute is timed to occur just before the annual conference of the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) at George Washington University from June 5-8, making it easier for participants to attend both if they so choose.