Postgraduate Travelling Scholarships

Twice yearly, the AGS invites applications for two travelling scholarships of up to £250/€350 each, intended to assist postgraduate members in travelling abroad to carry out research for their thesis or give a paper directly related to their area of study. The scholarships are intended to contribute to the costs of reasonable and necessary travel and/or accommodation.

The deadlines for applications are published via the German Studies mailbase. If unsuccessful the first time, applicants may re-submit their application in the following round. No further re-submissions will be accepted.

The following criteria of eligibility apply:

1. Applicants must be a fully paid-up member of the AGS at least from the submission of the application to the time of payment of the scholarship. It is the responsibility of applicants to ensure that their membership has been approved before their application is submitted.

2. Applicants must be registered at a university in Great Britain or Ireland for a PhD on a topic related to German Studies.

3. Postgraduate students based abroad or already carrying out research abroad are ineligible to apply.

4. Members who have already received a travelling scholarship from the AGS will not normally be considered for a second award.

An application statement of no more than 250 words as a MS Word document should be emailed as an attachment to the Hon. Treasurer. It should contain the following details:

1. The name and contact details of the applicant.

2. The applicant’s PhD thesis topic or title; the institution at which it is registered; and the full name of the supervisor(s).

3. Details of the research or paper, its relevance to the applicant’s thesis and the timing of the trip.

4. A costed breakdown of the items for which the applicant is seeking support.

5. Details of any other funding for the trip which the applicant has applied for or obtained. Applicants should note that the AGS encourages them also to seek funding from other bodies.


Applicants will be informed of the Committee’s decision within two months of the deadline.Successful applicants will receive their scholarship at that time.

Scholarship holders are required to supply to the Treasurer within three months of the completion of their trip a report on the visit of no more than 200 words, along with any relevant receipts or documentation, or copies thereof. The report must also be submitted as an email attachment, and it may be uploaded to the AGS website. If scholarship holders take any digital pictures they feel might enhance the website, they are welcome to submit these also!

Scholarships will be awarded at the discretion of the AGS Committee, which retains the right to apply further criteria of selection and eligibility.


Below, recent recipients of the Travelling Scholarship report on their experiences.

Sarah Guest

Travel Report for Research Visit to Germany
September 2005


PhD Title: The Professional Woman in Germany 1919-1939: A Case Study

The award of a travel bursary of £250.00 enabled me to spend ten days in Germany gathering material from the Staatsbibliothek and Leo Baeck Archiv in Berlin and the Deutsche Bücherei in Leipzig.

The first four days were spent at the Staatsbibliothek consulting specific articles in Die Ärztin. These publications support my argument that certain women doctors were complicit in the racialist implementation of birth control methods and sterilisation procedures from 1933.

Two days were spent at the Leo Baeck Archiv consulting the unpublished memoirs, diaries and private papers of two Jewish doctors. Material gathered strengthens my key argument that whilst Jewish women faced particular obstacles on account of their origins, it was the particular nature of Jewish upbringing and values which account for their academic motivation and their strong presence in the academic professions before 1933.

Two days at the Deutsche Bücherei enabled me to consult several books not available in Berlin, in particular two studies published by women doctors during the Third Reich detailing their professional stance on NS racial hygiene policy

My visit provided me with findings not only for my thesis but also for post-doctoral work as well as providing me with contacts which will help me further my academic work beyond the PhD thesis.

Sheridan Burnside

Travel Report for a Conference in Lublin
October 2005

PhD title: Forgetting to remember: the representation of the Holocaust in German literature

I received a AGS travelling scholarship for £250 to attend a postgraduate workshop on the history of the concentration camps. This was part of a series of meetings on this theme, organised annually by the German postgraduate research community. I had been to the workshop the previous year, which took place in Ulm, but without giving a paper, and was pleased to be selected to give a paper this year.

This was the first conference paper I gave based on research for my PhD which, together with the fact that it was to be given in German, made it a somewhat daunting experience. My paper was also first on the five day conference programme, on the evening of the first day, when all the delegates were rather tired, having travelled considerable distances across Europe in order to be there. Despite these circumstances, my paper, on the representation of Stutthof concentration camp in Günter Grass’s novel Hundejahre, went reasonably well and succeeded in stimulating a lively discussion. The workshop as a whole was excellent, particularly because it managed to generate a genuinely interdisciplinary engagement with the themes. In between research papers we visited the site of the nearby concentration camp, Majdanek, and the former death camp at Belzac.

I anticipate that these visits, and the workshop as a whole, will have a lasting impact on my research. I am extremely grateful to the AGS for making this possible and would like to thank the members of the Committee who awarded me the scholarship.

Benedict Schofield

Travel Report for Research Visit to Germany
September - December 2005

PhD Title: Class and Nation in the works of Gustav Freytag

The funding provided by the AGS contributed significantly to the travel expenses I incurred whilst undertaking a four month research trip to archives across Germany. During this trip I gathered materials - both in the form of Handschriften and secondary literature - to which I did not have access in the UK, and which were essential to the successful completion of my thesis.

As there is no central archive holding materials on Gustav Freytag, I had to divide my time between several instutions. The Gustav Freytag Nachlass is shared between the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin (Preußischer Kulturbesitz) and the Goethe und Schiller Archiv in Weimar. The Berlin archives contained letters by Freytag from the Vormärz period. These documents enabled me to define more closely the political and aesthetic developments in Freytag's writing prior to the revolutions of 1848. The Weimar archives yielded the correspondence between Freytag and Theodor Molinari - a fascinating account of Freytag's early political development.

My research also took me to the Gustav Freytag Museum und Archiv in Wangen im Allgäu, where I was able to read Handschriften of Freytag's unpublished Jugendgedichte, which shed new light on Freytag, who is generally seen as a bastion of programmatic Realism. The Gustav Freytag Museum und Archiv also held numerous rare studies on Freytag, which had been impossible to locate elsewhere. I also worked extensively in the Handschriftenabteilung of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in München, which held many letters and personal documents by and related to Freytag, whilst the main library held many of the key, yet difficult to locate, studies on Freytag.

I thank the AGS for awarding me this scholarship, without which I would have been unable to have undertaken this research visit. The trip allowed me to deepen my knowledge of the under-researched aspects of Gustav Freytag's work, providing me with material that will be of use not only for my PhD, but also for post-doctoral research.

Regina Standún

Travel Report for Research Visit to Austria
Summer 2007

PhD Title: The Rural Austrian Volksstück and Irish Peasant Play of the 20th Century – A Comparative Study

In the course of my research for my dissertation project ‘The Rural Austrian Volksstück and Irish Peasant Play of the 20th Century – A Comparative Study’, it is essential to visit Austrian libraries and archives in order to collect material relevant for the Austrian part of my comaparative study. Thanks to the Conference of University Teachers of German, I was able to travel to Vienna and Innsbruck in July 2007 where I visited the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, the Theatermuseum and the Institut für Theaterwissenschaften Wien as well as the University Library Innsbruck. Currently, I am working on the Austrian Volksstück playwright Peter Turrini and his position within the national theatres in Austria. In particular, I am interested in his play Sauschlachten and its reception from its first performance to date. I have been able to find published and unpublished research material at the libraries. Furthermore, I have been investigating the status of the Austrian rural play in the Burgtheater before and after 1945, for which the Theatermuseum’s Archives proved very helpful. I would like to thank the AGS for its contribution to my stay in Austria which, hopefully, will lead to the completion of my last chapter of my PhD.