Six people have been awarded $1200 fellowship grants to dive deeper into different folk traditions across the state over the next few months.

The Alabama Folklife Association uses the Cauthen Fellows program to award individual scholars one-year fellowships to research an Alabama folk tradition and produce an article for the association’s annual journal Tributaries. Last month, the association announced six winners for the 2024 fellowships.

The fellowships are open to scholars inside and outside of academic institutions, so the funding can be particularly helpful for scholars without academic support. The Fellows program also generates fieldwork and high caliber scholarship on Alabama folklife, which doesn’t always fit neatly into other funding or grant opportunities.

So let’s take a look at the six winners from around the state and what they will be working on.

2024 Cauthen Fellows

The Alabama Folklife Association (AFA) has awarded 23 fellowships since 2014, many of them coming in the last three years. The application process includes questions on what will be studied, why more research is needed, and what makes them the person to do the research.

Applications are scored by a panel of reviewers with various backgrounds and experience, representing academia, communities, artists, and nonprofits. It is open to applicants outside of Alabama, but the tradition of study has to be in Alabama.

“The other thing I love about Cauthen Fellowships (and what I love about folklife in general) is that they always represent a real range of tradition and experience; they easily showcase Alabama’s diversity. There is always a wide variety of art form, culture, and geography in the topics. And the resulting articles represent a range as well – we are very flexible on style – so some read like an academic journal article, some are part personal history, some are photo essays.”
~ AFA Executive Director Emily Blejwas

This year’s selected fellows are: