Paul Cuffe Memorial Fellowship

The Paul Cuffe Memorial Fellowship is offered by Mystic Seaport Museum to encourage research that considers the participation of Native and African Americans in the maritime activities of America, particularly in New England. Since 1989, the Museum has provided funds to researchers from universities, colleges, and museums. Two options are available: the Paul Cuffe Memorial Fellowship with a rolling deadline that supports research and writing, a portion of which should normally be carried out in the Mystic area; and the Paul Cuffe Memorial Fellowship with Summer Graduate Classes (deadline March 14, 2025) that builds the research and writing into six weeks of residence and summertime University of Connecticut graduate courses held at the Mystic Seaport Museum Munson Institute. Fellows have access to the G.W. Blunt White Library's research collection of nearly 1 million documents pertaining to maritime history, including ships' logs, journals, ledgers, diaries, and documents from the whaling, fishing, and shipping industries. Cuffe Fellows are requested to write a report on their research within one year. The fellowship is named after Paul Cuffe, born in 1759 on Cuttyhunk Island, Massachusetts, the son of a Wampanoag mother and a formerly enslaved African father who became a sea captain, shipowner, landowner, and respected community leader before his death in 1817.