A record-breaking year for the Presbyterian Historical Society

The Presbyterian Historical Society is pleased to award seven Research Fellowship grants in 2025. This is the largest cohort of scholars that the Society has welcomed into its archives since the Research Fellowship grant program was founded 20 years ago. For many years, a maximum of two grants were awarded, with three to four grants becoming the norm in 2016.

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PHS’s Research Fellowship program awards travel grants of $2,500 for scholars, students and independent researchers who demonstrate a need to work in the Society’s collection for a minimum of one week and whose current place of residence is more than 75 miles from Philadelphia.

The funds necessary for this program are primarily donation-based, with the PHS Giving Tuesday campaign being the main vehicle for fundraising. The 2024 Global Day of Giving campaign was a great success, given that it surpassed an already ambitious goal of raising $10,000 — enough to offer four grants in 2025 — and ended the campaign “thrilled to be able to offer a total of six grants,” as Director of Development Luci Duckson-Bramble told Presbyterian News Service in January. The Society is self-funding one additional grant for a total of seven in 2025.

“The Society received 25 excellent applications from scholars, students and independent researchers around the world. It was challenging to narrow them down, even with the flexibility afforded by additional funding to award seven grants this year,” said Director of Programs and Services Natalie Shilstut.

The 2025 Presbyterian Historical Society Research Fellows are:

Amber Clifford-Napoleone, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Central Missouri and the Director of the McClure Archives and University Museum, has been awarded a grant for the project, “Haymaker and the Ki’che: A Reparative Study.” Clifford-Napoleone will study the Society’s holdings relating to Edward McElwain Haymaker’s (1858-1947) work as a missionary to the Ki’che people in Guatemala.  “In repairing the long relationship between Presbyterian missionaries and indigenous peoples, there must be increased discussion and reparative work with the histories and writings of the missionaries,” writes Clifford-Napoleone. This project will “make possible a reparative catalog of the entire Haymaker Collections … providing both the institutions and the Guatemalan mission a comprehensive guide to the mission’s history.”

Adam T. Hogan, a graduate teaching assistant at Texas Tech University, has been awarded a grant for the project, “Witness to God's Creation: Cold War Religion, the Leisure Revolution, and A Christian Ministry in the National Parks (ACMNP).” The Society is the archives of the National Council of Churches (NCC), the ecumenical organization that established the ACMNP, which was a ministry of the NCC from 1951 to 1972. ”In addition to reflecting on questions of religious liberty,” Hogan’s project aims to “add to the growing literature on religion and environmental concerns.”

Sun Yong Lee, a junior fellow at the Kyujanggak International Center for Korean Studies at Seoul National University, has been awarded a grant for the project, “Kingdoms in Conflict: The 1941 Women's World Day of Prayer Case in Japanese-ruled Korea.” Lee’s project focuses on the understudied Women’s World Day of Prayer case, an incident which occurred on March 23, 1941, in colonial Korea when Japanese authorities issued a nationwide arrest notification for the American missionaries and Korean Christians involved with the distribution of the Women’s World Day of Prayer program. Lee will reconstruct the WDP case as “a window to explore the tensions between world powers” to “argue that Christianity, Protestantism in particular, became a battleground of conflicting national interests, signaling the inevitable war that followed.”

Euince M'biya, a doctoral candidate at West Virginia University, has been awarded a grant for the project, “British Imperialism, Presbyterian Mission Work and the Development of Malawi's Political Culture: 1870s to the 1970s.” Earlier research at the National Library of Scotland pointed M’biya to a connection between Scottish and American Presbyterian mission work in Malawi around the decolonization period. M’biya’s project will contribute to the “critically important yet understudied relationship between British imperialism, Presbyterian mission work and the development of political culture in Malawi.” Through the study of records held within the PHS archives, M’biya will draw out the missing links between the Scottish and American missions in Malawi and the country’s political culture at the dawn of its independence.

Jenny McGill, adjunct faculty member at Indiana Wesleyan University and an independent researcher, has been awarded a grant for the project, “Black American Female Presbyterian Missionaries to the Congo, 1890-1935.” PHS’s extensive holdings relating to Presbyterian foreign mission history, including the personal records of those working at the Congo stations, will “offer the much-needed original missionary accounts and descriptions as well as more information on historical Black schools that the Presbyterian Church oversaw. Reading these will provide further insight into the project of those involved in seeking to relocate Black Americans to Africa as well as the parties complicit in this pursuit,” McGill shared in an application.

Yun-Ching (Victoria) Shen, a doctoral candidate at Emory University, has been awarded a grant for the project, “Transpacific Taiwanese Female Christians' Political Activism from 1970 to 2000.” Shen’s research sheds light on the historical role of faith-based activism in shaping democratic movements. It also subverts the norm in that it focuses on the agency of overseas Taiwanese and Taiwanese American female Christians, rather than on the male-centered narratives that have dominated historical studies on the topic. Of the project, Shen writes, “This research is significant because it highlights the overlooked contributions of Asian Christian women in religious and political movements after WWII.”

Hong Zhang, Professor of East Asian Studies at Colby College, has been awarded a grant for the project, “Presbyterian Medical and Educational Missions in China, 1840-1950.” Zhang’s research takes a comparative approach to mission history. Zhang plans to study the American missionaries in China through the lens of three different denominations: Baptist, Methodist and Presbyterian. Zhang’s time working with the PHS archives “will be an integral and crucial part of … [the] project on the American Missionary Enterprise in China and its impact on modernizing the educational and medical fields in China.”

Presbyterian Historical Society staff are eager to welcome these seven new research fellows into the archives. If you are working on a research project that could be bolstered by the PHS archival holdings, consider applying for a 2026 research fellowship. The application deadline for 2026 fellowships is March 2, 2026. Awards will be announced on or before April 6. Find everything you need to apply here.