Annual Research Grants 2025
The PEF Annual Research Grants for 2025 are now closed.
Applications for the 2026 round will be accepted from mid December 2025 and will close in mid to late February 2026. Please refer to the documents attached for precise dates.
The Committee welcomes applications for grants to support research into the archaeology and history, ethnography, anthropology and culture, topography, geology, and natural sciences of Palestine and the Levant. Research projects involving the PEF’s own collections and archives are welcome. We accept applications from researchers of all nationalities. Membership of the PEF is a prerequisite for application.
Grants, normally between £450 and £2,000, are available to support field work (including museum, and archival work).
Applicants must be current members of the Palestine Exploration Fund (see https://www.pef.org.uk/join-us/membership/ for more details). Projects must avoid political, religious, or ideological bias, and must respect International laws relating to antiquities and archaeological activity in the Occupied Territories. Projects incorporating interviews with living subjects must ensure that proper procedural and safeguarding protocols are followed. Applications are welcomed from mid December to late February the following year, and awards will be announced in mid-March. Please email execsec@pef.org.uk if you have any questions or require further information.
THIS YEAR’S AWARDS WENT TO:
- Yasmin Fedda, Queen Mary University London
To make things grow: agriculture, orphans and history in Palestine
Grant awarded: £2,000.
• Alexander Wasse, Yeditepe Uni Istanbul
Desert Air Routes Project
£1,836.
• Anne Caldwell, University of Leeds
Decolonising the Institution: A Workshop on the Role of Storytelling and Technology in Public History
£1,865.36
- Reserve: Jeffrey Cumonow, Bryn Maur College Mapping Movement and Mobility in the Southern Levant £2,000
Grants will reopen for applications in December 2025.
Previous Research Grant Awards
Andrea Coffman, National Gallery of Art
“Assessing the collection of photographic works by the Zangaki brothers and Frank Mason Good at the PEF”
£2,000.
Bethany Walker University of Bonn
“Tracing the People and Lifeways of Ottoman Khirbet Beit Loya”
£2,000.
Holly Winters, University of Sydney.
“The Land Behind Aleppo: Urban Life and State Formation in Bronze Age Syria”
£2,000.
Total grants awarded: £6,000
Alex Worsfold, Leeds University
“British Women in Palestine: Teaching in Revolt, Opportunity and Lived Experience.”
£900
Bruce Routledge, University of Liverpool
“Reconstructing the Surface of Tell Dhiban.”
£453
Eleri Connick, University of Amsterdam
““If the house could speak”: Imagined Spaces of Nationhood in Nahr al-Bared.”
£1529
Loay Abu Alsaud, An-Najah National University, Nablus
“The Prominent Palestinian Archaeologists in the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries.”
£2000
Matthew Suriano & Daoud Ghool, University of Maryland & University of Newcastle “The Monolith of Silwan: Integrating Silwan Narratives into Historic Photographs.”
£1150
Grants will reopen for new applications in December 2024.
TOTAL AWARDED IN 2023: £6,032
James Donaldson, University of Queensland
“The Shellal Mosaic: Archaeological, Textual and Visual Traditions.”
£1,400
Micaela Sinibaldi, CBRL
“Towards a chronological framing of the two mosques of Islamic Baydha.”
£1,550
Mariana Ribas Albuquerque & Qwendolin Maurer, Institute of Archaeology, UCL
“Investigating changing socio-economic landscapes from the Early Bronze 1-111 in the Levant through Zooarchaeology.”
£1,700
Loay Abu Alsaud, Dept. of Tourism & Archaeology, Faculty of Humanity, Nablus
“Contribution of 2oth Century Palestinian Archaeologists, Yosra Al-Haifaweyeh, Nasr Dwekat, and Ibrahim Al-Fanni, to the Development of Archaeology in Palestine.”
Up to £3,500
TOTAL AWARDED IN 2022: £8,150
Alexandra Ariotti, Independent
“Dating the Lost Fortress of Umm Tawabin”
£2,500
Melissa Cradic & Samuel Pfister, Bade Museum, Pacific School of Religion
Digitising Primary Source Material for Open Access Virtual Exhibitions
£1,000
Claudine Dauphin, Independent
“Towards final publication of the Umayyad Syro-Jordanian Hajj Roads to Mecca and their Pilgrim Camps: Mapping ‘Sacred Landscapes.'”
£2,194.45
John Green, Independent
“The Tell es-Sa’idiyeh Cemetery Publication Project”
£1,000
TOTAL AWARDED IN 2021: £6,694.45
£12,000 was available for grant awards in 2020
The following awards were made:
Angelos Papadopoulos, College Year in Athens
“Cypriot and Mycenaean pottery at Tel el Hesi – a Comparative Study”
£750
Claudine Dauphin, Independent
“Sacred Landscapes”: The Ummayyad Syro-Jordanian Hajj Roads to Mecca and their Pilgrim Camps
£1,500
Chris Wilson, University of East Anglia
“Palestinian Psychiatric Patients in Lebanon during the Mandate Period”
£1,033
Diederik Halbertsma, University of Liverpool
“Episodic Labour Mobilisation During the Levant’s ‘Dark Ages’: The View from Khirbet al-Mudayna al-‘Aliya”
£500
Emanuel Pfoh, IMHICIHU-CONICET Buenos Aires
“The Ethnographic Construction of Palestine in the Works of Claude Reignier Conder”
£1,500
James Fraser, University of Sydney
“The Khirbet Ghozlan Excavation Project: Investigating Bronze Age horticulture in the Jordan Valley escarpment.”
£2,350
Mahmoud Hawari, University of Bethlehem
“Khirbat al-Mafjar Archaeological Project, Jericho”
£711
Omar Joseph Nasser-Khoury, Independent
“Phase III: Documentation of the British Museum’s Palestine Textile Collection: A Knowledge Exchange Fellowship 2018-2019″
£1,500
Will. M. Kennedy, Friedrich-Alexander Universitat Erlangen-Nurnberg
“The Petra Hinterland Social Landscapes Project”
£2,00
£12,000 was available for grant awards in 2019
The following awards were made:
James Fraser:
The Khirbet Ghozlan Excavation Project: Investigating Bronze Age horticulture in the Jordan Valley escarpment. £2,000
Yorke Rowan:
Eastern Badia Archaeological Project: Wisad Pools £3,500
Omar J Nasser Khoury:
Phase II: Documentation of the British Museum’s Palestine Textile Collection: A Knowledge Exchange Fellowship. £2,000
Pascal Flohr:
More than Meets the Eye: Locating Late Neolithic sites on the Kerak Plateau, Jordan. £1,060
Jeffrey Auerbach:
Exploring Palestine, 1865-1885: Public-Private Partnership and the origins of the British Mandate in Palestine. £2,000
£12,000 was available for grant awards in 2018
The following awards were made:
Charlotte Kelsted:
British Women’s Perceptions of Arab and Jewish Child-Rearing Practices and Family Relationships in Mandate Palestine: An Initial Research Trip £450
Yorke Rowan:
Eastern Badia Archaeological Project: Wisad Pools £4,325
Omar J Nasser Khoury:
Documentation of the British Museum’s Palestine Textile Collection: A Knowledge Exchange Fellowship £2,000
Micaela Sinibaldi:
Islamic Bayda Project £2,730
£12,000 was available for grant awards in 2017
The following awards were made:
Crispin Paine:
Religion, Modernity & the Material: Reception of the Holy Land £3,000
Gregory Bilotto:
A study of Fatimid metal Objects in the Keir Collection at the Dallas Museum of Art £500
Alexandra Ariotti:
‘Umm at Tawabin’: A Nabataean/Roman Military Camp, Ghor as-Safi, Jordan £3,000
Bruce Routledge:
Food production and consumption in times of change: the case of Tall Dhiban, Jordan £1,980
Monika Wanis:
Differences in Traditional Health Seeking Practices Between Rural and Urban Negev Bedouin Populations £500
Micaela Sinibaldi:
The Islamic Bayda Project £3,000
The PEF/Albright Institute Fellowship PEF
The Palestine Exploration Fund – Albright Institute Fellowship
London and Jerusalem.
Applications will reopen in autumn 2025.
An award of £3,000 to support research that requires access to the PEF archives and collection and also time spent in residence at the Albright Institute (AIAR) in Jerusalem. The Fellowship requires a minimum of 10 working days at the PEF in Greenwich, London, and a 1 month minimum stay at AIAR in Jerusalem. The room and half-board at the Institute ($1,500 per month) will come from the award, with the rest a flexible stipend for the other activities. This Fellowship is open to doctoral and post-doctoral researchers of all nationalities. This Fellowship is for a residential period between 1 September and 31 May in the following calendar year. The working days at the PEF may be completed anytime from the granting of the award until 31 May the following calendar.
Queries related to the PEF should be sent to grants@pef.org.uk. Queries related to the AIAR should be sent to c_shafer-elliott@baylor.edu. Applications should be made through the AIAR website here https://aiar.org/fellowships
2025 - 2026 PEF-Albright Institute Fellowship Award
Lisa Randisi (UCL) Archaeological Ephemera in Historic Collections from Palestine and Israel.
Previous PEF-Albright Institute Fellowships
Unfortunately, Madaline Harris-Schober, a PhD candidate at The University of Melbourne, who was awarded the PEF-AIAS Fellowship for her project, ‘Ritual architecture, Material Culture and Practice of the Philistines’, was unable to take up her fellowship.
Margaret Freeman (MIT) , Explorers, Archaeologists, and the Bedouin in the Built Environment of Late Ottoman Palestine.
Dr. Morag Kersel (DePaul University) Hidden Histories – the private lives of Levantine Neolithic masks
Jon Ross (University of Manitoba) – Fingerprint evidence for the division of labour and learning: a longitudinal study on pre-Classical pottery making in the western southern Levant-
The Routledge Philip R. Davies Early Career Publication Award 2024
This annual award honours the memory of Professor Philip R. Davies, prior Chair of the Fund, who died suddenly and before his time in May 2018. The Award recognises his unique contribution to scholarship, his enthusiasm for academic publishing, and his desire to develop younger scholars. The award encourages early career scholars in producing original, high quality research articles. To this end, rather than a single prize, the Fund awards prizes to the winner and up to two runners up for the best articles published in the PEF’s own peer reviewed journal, the Palestine Exploration Quarterly (PEQ), within the past calendar year. The PEQ focuses on the study of the Levant in the areas of archaeology, history, anthropology, geography, art, and languages.
Who can apply?
The award is open to scholars of all nationalities who have completed their Ph.D within
10 years of the current calendar year.
What is required?
Articles by early career scholars published in PEQ in the past calendar year can be
considered for this award.
How to enter?
If your article has been accepted for publication in PEQ within the calendar year, and you are
an early career researcher, you can put your paper forward to be considered for the
Davies Award. At the end of each calendar year, the PEF will contact the authors of
accepted papers. Please indicate your eligibility in your response. The award will be made
at the end of each calendar year.
What is the Prize?
The winner will receive a cash prize of £750, with the first runner up awarded £350 and
the second runner up £100.
Deadline:
N/A.
Davies Publication Awards 2024
The winner and runners up for 2024 will be announced in early March 2025.
Previous Davies Publication Awards
Winner – Dr. Joseph Scales (University of Birmingham) ‘Bathing Jewish, bathing Greek: Developing an Approach to De-Categorising Hellenism and Judaism
Runner-up – Dr. Assaf Kleiman (Leipzig University) ‘The Cultural Heritage of Two Volute Capitals in Iron Age Hazor’
Second Runner-up – Dr. Marieke Dhont (University of Cambridge/Harvard University) ‘The Use of Greek in Palestine: Eupolemus as a Case Study’
Successful projects from previous years are listed below. Follow our grants researchers in the field by visiting our blog.
Reports will be published in PEQ, and blogs will be posted on the PEF blog. Click on the link above to see these reports.
