junior research fellowship st john's cambridge

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Junior Research Fellowships (JRFs)

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JRF's are fixed term awards of college membership, given to early stage academics, often before final submission of their PhD or shortly afterwards. They are awarded on the basis of research excellence, are prestigious and highly competitive.

Stipendary JRF's include a salary, non-stipendary ones don't. The connection to a college sometimes, but not always, includes benefits such as accommodation or meals. Teaching, and other college responsibilities, vary dependent on college requirements.

Applying for JRFs - finding openings

• Look for JRFs on jobs.ac.uk , the Reporter , the Oxford Gazette, the Guardian and The Times HE section. Some are only advertised on college websites, check them regularly.
• Any age / seniority limitations should be indicated on the advert. Many have limits on amount of time passed since gaining first degree / since beginning PhD.
• Overseas applicants: Colleges should specify whether you need the right to work in the UK or whether they could sponsor your visa; but as long as immigration rules are in flux, keep checking the UKVI website.
• Application deadlines for different colleges are spread over the entire year.
• Apply to as many Colleges as possible
• Not all Colleges will be advertising JRFs in your subject area in a particular year
• Do not be afraid to ring the Colleges up to resolve uncertainties (many questions can be asked without giving your name!)
• Making JRF applications takes time and should not be rushed, start drafting ideas and networking early.
• Some Oxbridge ‘fellowships’ are more like junior lectureships.

The application procedure

• First round of applications
• Long shortlist (~30 applicants) – written work requested
• Written work evaluated by anonymous specialist assessors, usually external
• Final shortlist (~8 applicants)
• Candidates invited for interview
• Successful candidates (in most cases 2, probably one in humanities, one in sciences)
• Create a table for your JRF applications to keep track: deadlines, paperwork required, what stage each application has reached etc.

Perseverance and resilience needed

• Apply early (before finishing PhD) and often.
• You are likely to be competing against people you know, like and respect.
• Applying can last 18 months if applying to all available JRF's. The process can be exhausting at a time when you are uncertain about your post PhD future (and probably writing up as well). Don't lose heart - many do and drop out of the process.
• Do your research (in your field) and be realistic about your chances. Find out who has been successful in the past. how does your CV look against theirs, get honest feedback from referees, sponsors etc.
• Statistically there are more good researchers than there are JRF's to offer. If you're getting shortlisted it is a good sign. Keep going and you may well get an offer in due course. Plenty of people have good academic careers without a JRF.
• It’s acceptable to re-apply to a college that you applied to in a previous competition.
• Usually 150-250 applications per place, 700 applications for the big group competitions. However, numbers are unpredictable: one subject-specific competition had 16 applicants one year, and 86 the next.
• 'Open competitions' may not be truly open – they may unofficially want / not want a certain subject, but you won’t know this. Do not be disheartened if your application does well at some colleges and is rejected outright at others.
• Some interviewers may have decided in advance that they are not interested in certain candidates. They are not accountable to HR in the way that other employers would be. Hiring / shortlisting process is not 100% transparent. You often get unofficial feedback but rarely hear anything officially.
• There is always a lot of luck involved! It’s a complicated and opaque process.

Surviving meanwhile (during the application process)

Many leave applying until after submitting their PhD which leaves a gap before any JRF would start.

• Research Assistant roles, either full or part time, keeps you in academia and available for networking, interviews etc
• Supervisions (which pay in arrears)
• Guest lectures - network to offer these
• Academic administration (try the Cambridge Temporary Employment Service)

Applying for JRFs - research proposal and CV

• Have an draft version of your statement ready to develop.
• It needs to address: why I should be doing the research; why here; why now; why at all.
• Format for easy consumption 
• It is worth starting to apply early, so that you can refine your proposals with practice. Many applicants apply before finishing their PhDs. If your PhD is not yet published, specify time and outcome for this.
• Focus on your achievements so far.
• In your research statement / proposal give detail on which journals you plan to submit to. Specify concrete outcomes (book? Articles?), preferably with a temporal structure.
• Should be comprehensible to academics not in your field, i.e. only semi-technical. Get someone else not in your field to read it, and make it very clear why your research is extra special. Use key words to ring bells with different interest groups.
• Ask friends, colleagues etc to read over the proposal and give you honest blunt feedback.

Writing sample

• Requirements will depend on your subject; could be parts of your Thesis; could be publications (you will be asked to specify your contribution)
• A trick: if you have more good work than they asked to see, send in the lot and say ‘please read portions X, Y and Z’
• For scientists, sending stand-alone journal articles is relatively straightforward. For arts researchers, you will have to chop bits out of your PhD / book, which is much harder; you probably need a short prefatory explanation to put it in context. Get friends, family to read your writing sample.
• Keep it mostly academic
• Include any prizes and publications in preparation; publications are important
• Show that you’re a workhorse, not a navel-gazer
• Include a few interests to demonstrate how you might contribute to college life
• No need to itemise the tripos papers you supervise more than once

Applying for JRFs - referees/readers

• 2-3 referees, of whom one can be your PhD supervisor. It's the referees' role to suggest readers to college.
• Referees are very important - choose them carefully. Some Colleges will immediately disregard any candidate without strong references. Unclear at what stage colleges obtain references.
• Locate allies in UK academia – this takes time.
• Remember to keep those who aren’t your supervisor informed about your PhD’s progress.
• Ask referees’ advice about what of your written work to submit.
• Readers are very important. Should include people outside of Cambridge. Make sure (via your referees, or direct, if your referees take suggestions of readers from you) that they understand what a JRF is. You need readers who are sympathetic to your work.
• Longlisted only and your supervisor surprised you’re making no more progress? Consider changing your non-supervisor referees. They may be too busy to read you properly, especially if they’re much in demand because known as a good referee. Or – one of your referees may be recommending the wrong reader.
• If not shortlisted in your own colleges: consult fellows in your subject in your college.

Give your referees:

• A list of deadlines, arranged in temporal sequence (update and re-send the list as necessary)
• Your research proposal(s)
• Plenty of advance warning!
• Sometimes, despite all the reminders, referees FORGET to send references. Make sure this doesn’t happen to you!! For online applications, referees are sent automatic reminders; you can track whether they have submitted your reference.
• Colleges may not give referees much instruction. Check what your referees want, but it’s good to send them the advert and flag up any salient points, e.g. teaching experience is / is not required in this competition.
• are usually around 30 mins.
• can include a 5 minute presentation with handouts.
• Giving a presentation is NOT like reading out an article. If you memorise your presentation, this should not be obvious!

What a college wants from an interview

• Some colleges interview and some don't. On the whole, those that do want to know "what can you contribute to college", those that don’t tend to be more concerned purely with your research.
• Research the college – they may ask you what you will contribute to college life. Look for gaps in the subjects covered by college. Talk to current JRFs at different colleges.
• If possible, find out who your interviewers are in advance, read their research profiles. Read the profiles of other researchers in college: how would you fit in?
• If you are being interviewed, you are academically excellent; so part of the aim is to see what you are like as a person.
• Teaching may or may not come up in discussion. It is good to ask for teaching opportunities, e.g. lecturing, teaching masters students – you will need experience for lectureship applications. Provide a list of papers you can teach for.
• Questions on longer term future plans – how you would use your JRF, publishing plans.

Preparing for an interview or presentation

• Do practice interviews / go over your CV.
• Practice soundbites describing your work – 1 min, 5 mins, 10 mins. This is useful both for interviews and networking. Don’t sound pre-programmed.
• Panels are often mixed specialist / general. Include names of well-known people (or concepts) in your presentation, so that the generalists can connect to your work. Subject-specific competitions still have a generalist interview panel. When an interviewer in a mixed panel asks a specialist question, it’s ok to give two answers: first answer the specialist, then "allow me to rephrase this in more general terms".
• Usually includes a short technical interview with an expert.
• Non-specialists often unwittingly ask very difficult questions. Remember: audiences absorb new information slowly. Use analogies the audience can relate to. Whenever you have to present yourself (whether orally or in writing), consult with friends from a different field.

See also the section on JRFs from our guide on Interview Skills for Academia .

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Research Fellowships 2025

University of cambridge - st john's college, cambridge.

Four Fellowships available

Fixed term, up to 4 years

Awards will be made in January 2025

St John’s College, in the University of Cambridge, invites applications for up to four Research Fellowship awards, tenable for up to four years from 1 October 2025. These prestigious awards offer a rare opportunity to devote yourself to independent research in a stimulating and supportive academic environment. We place great importance on the intellectual contribution our Research Fellows make to St John’s, and on creating the conditions to accelerate their progress towards outstanding academic careers.

Eligibility

We accept applications from a graduate of any university within or outside the United Kingdom, and welcome applications from all academic disciplines, to sustain a diverse community of award holders.

Our Research Fellowship awards are for early-career academics. Successful candidates will normally either be postdoctoral researchers who have been awarded their PhD within the last two years or graduate students in the latter stages of research leading to a PhD. Candidates holding a fellowship or other postdoctoral stipend (for example, awarded by a Research Council or other similar body) may apply, noting that any stipend or other funding received will be deducted from the Research Fellowship award.

Holders of a Fellowship at a Cambridge college may not apply. Candidates who accept a Fellowship from another Cambridge college will be deemed to have withdrawn from St John’s College’s Research Fellowship competition.

We typically receive between 600 and 800 eligible applications for Research Fellowship awards. More information about our College and current Research Fellows can be found at: St John's College Research Fellowships competition 2025 | St John's College, University of Cambridge

Terms of the award and accompanying Fellowship

The award offers a research stipend of £31,396 to £33,966 pa for up to four years, and award holders are elected to a Research Fellowship for this period. Award holders are permitted to receive additional pay for up to six hours' College or University teaching a week.

Research Fellows benefit from up to £10,000 in additional grants over their four-year tenure. These grants support the costs of academic materials, travel expenses, computer equipment, books and, where appropriate, the expense of extended periods of research outside Cambridge. Additionally, during their four-year tenure, we offer up to £5,700 towards the costs of organising a conference or workshop in St John’s.

Research Fellows can choose to live in College in single residential accommodation, with charges applying for services and supplies. Research Fellows who live outside College, including those who live with their partner/family, are eligible for a housing allowance worth up to £34,800 over their four-year tenure. This allowance is paid monthly and is capped at 50% of rent paid. Research Fellows living outside St John’s will have an office in College. Fellowships are held on condition of residence within the University of Cambridge, i.e. within 20 miles of the centre of Cambridge. Research Fellows are also entitled to take one meal each day in College, at College expense.

Subject to circumstances, we will consider:

• A deferral for up to one year before the Research Fellowship award and associated Fellowship commences;
• Periods of working away from Cambridge for the purposes of research for up to one year;
• A period undertaking a remunerated academic position that contributes to professional development (e.g. a temporary teaching position) of up to one year, during which the award holder will forgo the College stipend.

How to apply

Your application must be  submitted online  by 14:00 BST on 19 th September 2024. Referees will have until 14:00 BST on 24 th September to complete your references.

You can submit an application before getting all three references, but your application will be considered incomplete if the references are not added by the reference deadline. It is your responsibility to ensure that referees submit their references in time.

No interviews are held. Rigorous assessment of submitted written work, previous research achievements and research intentions are of primary importance.

St John’s College policies are fully inclusive, regardless of age, disability, sex, sexual orientation, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, gender identity or reassignment, or relationship status.

Please note the College is unable to advise or assist individual candidates on any matters concerning eligibility or the content of their applications. You can find Candidate FAQs here

For technical enquiries or difficulties accessing the application site, contact:  [email protected]  +44 1223 338 609

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St John's College Research Fellowship 2025

(St John's College, Cambridge)

Deadline for applications is 19 Sep 2024 14:00 UK local time Deadline for references is 24 Sep 2024 14:00 UK local time Note: this page is *not* for referees. If you are a referee please use the unique link in the email sent to you.

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2024 Research Fellowships, St John’s College, University of Cambridge

St John’s College, University of Cambridge, invites applications for up to four Research Fellowships, tenable for up to four years from 1 October 2024.

The Fellowships offer an opportunity to carry out independent research in a stimulating and supportive academic environment.

Applications will be accepted from any graduate of a university within or outside the United Kingdom. Successful candidates are normally expected to be post-doctoral researchers who have been awarded their PhD within the last two years or graduate students in the latter stages of their research leading to a PhD.

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Junior Research Fellowships/Early Career Fellowships

The College intends to appoint two Junior Research Fellows (JRFs) from 1 October 2025 in each of the following subject areas: the history of the Brittonic-speaking and/or Gaelic-speaking peoples c. AD 350–1200 and Chemistry.

Junior Research Fellowships offer early-career academics of exceptional intellectual calibre the opportunity to pursue research for up to three years at Queens’ College, Cambridge. The College is a particularly attractive environment for research. The academic expertise sustained by the fellowship and the postgraduate community is especially diverse, and the College library is an important international resource for scholarship.

These posts are intended to be early-career appointments open to graduates who are well advanced in their doctoral research or those who have recently completed it, and they may be stipendiary or non-stipendiary. JRFs will receive mentoring within the College. We will make all reasonable efforts to help JRFs to receive professional and academic mentoring within the appropriate department or faculty, or other affiliated institution of the University of Cambridge.

JRFs are members of the Senior Combination Room and they are expected to play an active part in the community of the College. They are welcome to undertake teaching by arrangement with the Senior Tutor.

The Fellowship is stipendiary if the appointee is to engage in full-time research. Annual salary starts at £32,332 for a postdoctoral appointment (or £27,979 for a pre-doctoral appointment), together with benefits worth over £7,875 p.a. Candidates who have recently taken up, or are about to take up, a salaried postdoctoral research position within the University of Cambridge are eligible and welcome to apply for a non-stipendiary Junior Research Fellowship. Successful candidates will be encouraged to take an active part in the academic life of the relevant department of the University of Cambridge.

Further particulars concerning the posts are to be found below.

Applications Procedure

Applications are to be submitted electronically via our online application system:

https://app.casc.cam.ac.uk/fas_live/qu_jrf.aspx

Completed applications must be submitted via the online system no later than 1200 on 27 September 2024. Applicants are entirely responsible for ensuring the completeness of their applications. Neither incomplete nor late applications will be considered.

Interviews will be held in late November 2024.

If you, your research supervisor or your referees have any queries about the online application procedure or are unable to use the online application form, please contact Mrs Jessica Spicer by e-mail ( [email protected] ) or telephone (01223 335531 or +44 1223 335531) for further advice.

J. G. A. Pocock (1924–2023)

The death of J. G. A. Pocock on 12 December 2023, three months shy of his 100th birthday, deprived the world of one of its most fertile and creative historians of political thought. It also bereaved the Folger Institute’s Center for the History of British Political Thought of a founder and its guiding spirit over almost forty years.

John Pocock was born a subject of the king-emperor George V in London in 1924. At the age of three, he moved with his family to New Zealand when his father took up the chair in classics at Canterbury College (now the University of Canterbury). The move from one set of islands, off the northwestern coast of Eurasia, to another, in the southwestern reaches of the Pacific Ocean, expanded Pocock’s historical imagination and shaped his global vision for the rest of his life. Like many anglophone settlers of his generation, Pocock saw Britain as home and, along with many academically ambitious antipodeans, he returned ‘home’ for his higher degrees: first a master’s in education, supervised by the father of fellow historian of political thought Richard Tuck, and then the Cambridge doctoral thesis under Herbert Butterfield that became Pocock’s masterpiece, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (1957). After a junior research fellowship at St John’s College, Cambridge, he returned to New Zealand to teach history at Canterbury and political science at the University of Otago until the University of Washington in St Louis recruited him in 1966. Pocock would remain in the United States for the rest of his distinguished career, the bulk of it spent in the History Department at the Johns Hopkins University from which he retired, as Harry C. Black Professor emeritus , in 1994. He passed away peacefully in Baltimore, his home city since 1974, surrounded by his family.

Three overarching themes inform Pocock’s extensive body of historical scholarship: historical thought as a mode of political thinking; the civic, or republican, tradition as a bridge between pre-modernity and modernity; and British history as a global narrative of sovereignty, settlement and self-reflexivity. His major works, from The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law to his crowning six-volume study of Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, Barbarism and Religion (1999–2015), completed at the age of 91, were studies of historical thinking in its multiple national, regional and cosmopolitan contexts. The history of historiography was the scarlet thread running through his work and many of his studies of strictly political thought sprang from this primary commitment, for example his germinal treatments of Hobbes’s eschatology, of Harrington’s account of property and of Burke’s political economy. Thinking in, and with, time was also the central theme of his pivotal opus, The Machiavellian Moment (1975), a demanding reflection on the durability of polities in secular time from the Aristotelian polis to the American republic under Richard Nixon. And the reconstruction of history around shifting identities over time was both the subject and the goal of the plea Pocock first made in 1973 for a ‘New British History’, attentive to its multinational matrix in the ‘Atlantic archipelago’ and its global dispersion throughout the common law settler world and beyond.

The Center for the History of British Political Thought at the Folger Library institutionalized the study of what Pocock called ‘the unending pursuit of contexts and texts to place in them’ from the late Middle Ages to the nineteenth century. Pocock inaugurated it along with his fellow founders, Gordon J. Schochet and Lois G. Schwoerer , in 1984. Over the first two decades of the Center’s existence, Pocock, alone or in tandem with other members of the Center’s Steering Committee and an array of outside visitors, ran a series of probing seminars that mapped British political thought in its English, Scottish, Irish, archipelagic and Atlantic contexts. This enterprise produced a series of field-shaping collective volumes from the Folger Institute and later from Cambridge University Press that spread the fruits of intense discussions at the Folger to an increasingly globalized community of historians of British political thought. Those lucky enough to have attended the Center’s seminars or its many parallel workshops and conferences will always recall Pocock’s magisterial, and often oracular, presence and the insights and provocations that set off innumerable research projects. The Center recreated British political thought as a field of study and, in so doing, fashioned a worldwide community of practitioners indebted to Pocock’s uniquely generous vision of historical inquiry.

Beyond the Center and the Folger, Pocock’s legacy resonates in his emphasis on the languages of political thought—juridical, historical, ecclesiastical among others; in his deprovincialization of English and British political thought in their European, Atlantic and global extensions; in his recalibration of James Harrington’s significance in the histories of Country ideology, ‘neo-Machiavellian’ political economy and the Atlantic republican tradition; in his elaborate stratigraphy of Gibbon’s historiography; and in his irreversible reframing of British history as a planetary story of competing sovereignties and identities: archipelagic, national and Indigenous. Perhaps less well known to those who encountered him only through his published works were Pocock’s other enduring passions: for colonial and imperial poetry; for the works of J. R. R. Tolkien; and for a century of cinema, possibly the only deep indulgence in modernity Pocock allowed himself. To speak with him was always to be awed—by his erudition, his eloquence and his originality—-and often to be overawed by his flattering assumption that you knew, say, every detail of Gibbon’s Islamic sources as well as he did. To hear Pocock lecture was to listen to a voice from another age, inflected (as he sometimes noted) with the inherited accents of Jersey and South Africa as well as those of New Zealand and post-War Cambridge. And to receive from him a letter or fax, written like his books in longhand with a fountain pen, was to connect with a pre-Internet era of intellectual exchange that has effectively passed into history with him. Above all, to revisit Pocock’s lapidary essays and immersive books is to encounter a master mind, the mighty equal of those historical thinkers from Machiavelli to Gibbon he met on their own terms. For as long as there are historians of political thought and, especially, histories of historical thinking, John Pocock’s commanding oeuvre will endure.

DAVID ARMITAGE On behalf of the Steering Committee, Center for the History of British Political Thought

J. G. A. Pocock: Major Publications

The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century (1957, reissued with a retrospect, 1987)

[[Politics, Language and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History[[ (Chicago, 1972)

The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, 1975)

(ed.) The Political Works of James Harrington (Cambridge, 1977)

(ed.) Three British Revolutions: 1641, 1688, 1776 (Princeton, 1980)

Virtue, Commerce and History: Essays on Political Thought and History Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1985)

(ed.) Edmund Burke: Reflections on the Revolution in France (Hackett, 1987) editor

(co-ed.) The Varieties of British Political Thought 1500–1800 (Cambridge, 1993)

Barbarism and Religion , 6 vols. (Cambridge, 1999–2015)

The Discovery of Islands: Essays in British History (Cambridge, 2005)

Political Thought and History: Essays on Theory and Method (Cambridge, 2009)

Research Fellowship Competition

Up to four Fellowships available from 1 October 2025

Stipend: £31,396 to £33,966 p.a. for up to four years

Competition opens: 31 July 2024 

Closing date: 19 September 2024

Please go to the following page for further details and for information on how to apply:

St John's College Research Fellowships competition 2025 | St John's College, University of Cambridge