Laura Bassi Scholarship Grant

The Laura Bassi Scholarship, established in 2018, provides editorial assistance to postgraduates and junior academics researching overlooked topics across all disciplines. This scholarship is awarded three times annually in December, April, and August. It offers $750 for master’s candidates, $2,500 for doctoral candidates, and $500 for junior academics, with a total funding pool of $8,000 per round. Named after Laura Bassi, a pioneering academic, it encourages innovative scholarship.

The Laura Bassi Scholarship was established in 2018 with the aim of providing editorial assistance to postgraduates and junior academics whose research focuses on neglected topics of study, broadly construed, within their disciplines. The scholarships are open to every discipline and are awarded three times per year: December, April, and August.
These figures reflect the upper bracket of costs of editorial assistance for master’s theses, doctoral dissertations, and academic journal articles, respectively.
Born in Bologna in 1711, Laura Bassi was the first woman to take up a professorship in Europe and the second to earn a doctorate. Her extraordinary career as an academic spanned nearly five decades, for much of which she was a galvanizing figure for the scientific culture of eighteenth century Europe. Bassi’s admirers included the likes of Voltaire in France, who preferred Bassi’s academy to that of London’s, and Dorothea Erxleben in Germany, the first woman to earn a medical doctorate, who notably found inspiration in Bassi’s fierce struggle for equal opportunity for women. Bassi's career culminated in her succession to the chair of physics (then known as natural philosophy) at the University of Bologna in 1776—a role in which her husband, Giuseppe Veratti, was her assistant.
The Editing Press Laura Bassi Scholarship is named in her honour, in part with the intention of supporting work undertaken against the grain of the disciplinary fashions of academia.
Funding
The value of the scholarship is remitted solely through editorial assistance as follows:

• Master’s candidates: $750Doctoral candidates: $2,500Junior academics: $500

We have set aside $8,000 per round of funding (or roughly $24,000 per annum), which is divided between any combination of master’s, doctoral, or junior academic applicants at the discretion of the Scholarship Advisory Board.

Eligibility

All currently enrolled master’s and doctoral candidates are eligible to apply, as are academics in the first five years of full-time employment. There are no institutional, departmental, or national restrictions.There are no restrictions on how many times one can apply, nor on how many times successful candidates can apply—though, in the case of the latter, preference is given to applicants who have not been given scholarships in the past.