Apply for a Travel Award
Available Awards
This award is available to researchers focusing on the African American experience. It is made possible by a generous contribution by KU Professor Emerita Sandra Gautt.
The Spencer Library documents the African American experience in Kansas and the region through extensive collections of personal papers and the records of organizations, businesses, and churches. Other potentially relevant materials can be found in KU's University Archives and the Wilcox Collection of Contemporary Political Movements.
This award is available for researchers focusing on the Polish 16th and 17th centuries. It is made possible through a generous endowment from Alexander and Valentine Janta.
Polish (and Polish-related) manuscript holdings in Spencer Library include the Graziani-Commendone collection of 16th and 17th century correspondence and other papers about Catholic Church affairs and the Graziani and Commendone families. The manuscripts in Latin, Polish, and Italian include:
- Letters from Bishop Antonio Maria Graziani to Cardinal Commendone and others, as well as ciphers, speeches, reports, notes, constitutions, etc., about 360 items, 1571-1573. Call number: MS 62.
- Letterbooks of Cardinal Commendone,16 books, some bound together, 1560-1581. Call numbers: MS 86, MS E97, MS E105.
- Letterbooks of Bishop Antonio Maria Graziani, 5 volumes, 1596-1599. Call numbers: MS E110, MS D121.
- Collections of texts, 290 items. Call numbers: MS 87, MS D120, MS D123.
- Legal documents of Graziani Family, 24 items. Call number: MS 205.
- Separate manuscript books, 4 items. Call numbers: MS D112, MS B73, MS D118, MS D119.
Early printed books of the 16th and 17th centuries about Poland and its history are held in the Summerfield Collection of Continental European books printed before 1701. In addition to many of the books listed in Janina Hoskins’ Early and Rare Polonica of the 15th-17th Centuries (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1973), Spencer Research Library holds at least 67 titles not listed in Hoskins; see Barbara Backus McCorkle, “Addenda to Hoskins: Polonica,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America (PBSA), 69 (1975), 380-388.
This award is available to researchers working on a project that could benefit from using any of the collections at Spencer Research Library. See the Collections section of the Spencer website to learn more about the library's holdings.
Eligibility Criteria
Travel grants will be awarded to faculty, undergraduates, graduate students, or independent researchers living outside a 100 mile radius from Lawrence, Kansas. All three grants are open to U.S. and international researchers. Applicants must document a research agenda requiring the need for in-person access to materials held by Kenneth Spencer Research Library. Grant money may be used for travel, lodging, and other expenses while pursuing research at the library.
Award recipients may be asked to give a brief, informal presentation about their research topic during their visit.
Application Procedures and Deadlines
The awards committee is reviewing applications for travel between March 1 and December 19, 2025. Applicants will be notified by February 21, 2025.
We are not currently accepting travel award applications. Information about applying for an award for travel to Spencer in 2026 will be posted here in early September. Please check back for updates.
2024 Awardees
Whayne Travel Award
Alyssa P. Cole, University of Florida: Movement Before the Movement: Black Women’s Health Activism in Kansas City
Brooke Thomas, George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center and Africana Research Center at Pennsylvania State University: "To Capture a Vision Fair": Black Sorority Women and the Shift from Respectability Politics to Public Policy, 1935–1975
Spencer Travel Award
Chris Blakley, Occidental College: MS J14 in Motion: Networks Within the “Hindu Animals and Native Trades” Album
Malcolm Noble, Leicester Vaughan College: Queer Uses of Printing and Duplicating Technologies: Magazines and Serials in the Bruce McKinney Collection
Georg N. Schäfer, Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology: Hiding in Plains Sight: Tracing the Emergence of the Anthropocene Between Kansas’ Dust Bowls
Carlisle Yingst, Harvard University: Ephemeral History: Documentary Form and the Everyday in the British Novel, 1720-1850
Previous Awardees
Whayne Travel Award
Dr. Zeb Baker (2017), Miami University: Race and College Football in Post World War II Midwest
Charisse Burden-Stelly (2020), Carleton College: Professional Revolutionary: The Political Theory of Doxey Wilkerson, 1930-1960
Brandon Byrd (2023), Vanderbilt University: Pap: The Life and Lessons of Benjamin Singleton
Brent Campney (2018), University of Texas Rio Grande Valley: Black freedom struggle in Kansas, World War II to the 1970s and The Peculiar Climate of This Region: Racism, Repression, and Resistance in the Midwest
Paul Fowler III (2017), University of Massachusetts Amherst: Civil Rights Organizations in the Midwest
Curtis Inabinett, Jr. (2016), Charleston State University: Dr. William P. Foster and the Florida A&M University Marching Band
Sandra Jackson-Opoku (2022), Author: Black Exoduster experience in Kansas for her novel Black Rice
Paul Putz (2016), Baylor University: Western Negro Press Association
Crystal Sanders (2018), Pennsylvania State University: Out-of-state tuition grant programs instituted to prevent African American students from attending public universities, 1921-1948
Kristin Schodorf (2022), Little House on the Prairie Museum: Verlean Tidwell Family Papers, Black churches in and around Independence, Kansas
Sherri L. Smith (2020), Goddard College and Hamline University: United African American Aviators Project
Brandy Thomas Wells (2018), Augusta University: African-American women’s internationalism, 1890-1970
Derrick E. White (2019), Dartmouth College: Ball and Parlay: Black Culture and Black College, Dr. William P. Foster and the Florida A&M University Marching Band
Jeffery Williams (2017), University of South Carolina: Topeka, Kansas, civil rights lawyer Charles S. Scott
Janta Travel Award
Giacomo Mariani (2022), University of Modena and Reggio Emilia: The Graziani Archive: A Virtual Reassembling of a Divided Archive
Massimo Moretti (2020), Sapienza University of Rome: Art and Diplomacy in the Europe of the Counter-Reformation: The Archive of A. M. Graziani
Spencer Travel Award
Richard Branscomb (2020), Carnegie Mellon University: Defending the Self, Preserving Community: Paramilitarization and the Radical Right
John A. Carranza (2020), University of Texas at Austin: Explaining Sex: Sex Education and Disability in the United States from the 1960s to the 1990s
Paul Hutchinson (2023), University of Bristol, United Kingdom: "Every Damn One of ’Em’s Got a Little Piece of Land in His Head": Masculinity and Ecological Crisis in the Dust Bowl
Bethan Johnson (2023), Harvard University: Alpha: James Mason and His Lone Wolf Army’s War on the World
Stephen Karian (2020), University of Missouri: The Oxford Edition of Alexander Pope’s Miscellany Poems
Christina Lord (2023), University of North Carolina Wilmington: From French Comics to "Star Wars": Trans-Atlantic Visual Culture in Science Fiction
Samantha McLoughlin (2022), Florida State University: “I’d Like to Thank My Husband for His Permission to Be Here”: How Phyllis Schlafly Successfully Organized Equal Rights Amendment Opposition
Chelsea Reutcke (2022), University of St Andrews, Scotland: Catholic Print Networks in Restoration England
Daniel Ruggles (2023), Brandeis University: Conservative Student Organizations and the American Right, 1960-Present
Sean Scanlon (2019), University of Nebraska-Lincoln: Conservative Evangelical Christians, Israel, and U.S. foreign policy
Elle Schneider (2022), Director and Cinematographer: Why Study Industrial Film? The Story of Centron Corporation
Kitty Shropshire (2019), Carnegie Mellon University: American Apocalypse: White Nationalism, Race War, and the Media
Sarah Anne Storti (2019), University of Virginia: English poet and novelist Letitia Elizabeth Landon (L.E.L.)