Currently 8 active research and journalism grants, fellowships and residencies open to applicants in the UK. Hand-curated and updated weekly. Almost every entry is funded; a few notable unpaid open calls and festival submissions are included as clearly flagged exceptions. Browse the list below, or use the interactive desk for filtering and shortlisting.
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The UAL AKO Storytelling Institute, with the Power of Pop Fund, is recruiting six Storytelling Research Fellows to run independent research projects on how storytelling in popular culture shapes attitudes, behaviour and public discourse. Fellows work across media including television, film, gaming, podcasts and digital culture, are supported by the Institute's Head of Research and a peer cohort, and produce actionable findings for creative practitioners, funders and social-impact organisations, presented at a closing public symposium. ELIGIBILITY: experienced researchers with a PhD or equivalent research expertise gained academically, independently or through professional practice, with a track record of delivering high-quality research and working with external partners. Practice-based and non-academic researchers are explicitly in scope. APPLICATION: CV, record of publications, a research proposal of 1,000 to 1,200 words, and a supporting statement including at least one example of a research project you designed and delivered. Applications via the UAL jobs portal; closes 11 September 2026.
Paid in-person research fellowship in Cambridge for people who want to build expertise in AI safety or AI governance. Fellows develop and complete a research project on mitigating risks from frontier AI, working in one of three streams: technical safety, governance, or technical AI governance. WHAT YOU GET: a GBP 10,000 stipend for the 10-week programme, visa support, travel expense coverage, meals during working hours, expert mentorship from established researchers, dedicated research management support aimed at publishing in top venues, and immersion in Cambridge's AI safety research community with regular social and networking events. Top performers can be extended by 6 months or more through the Research Scholars programme. ELIGIBILITY: open to anyone 18 or older; the programme is talent-first with no formal credential requirement, welcoming researchers, students and professionals from technical, policy, security, legal, economic and other relevant backgrounds; prior formal research experience is not required. SELECTION: three stages, a written application of roughly 2 hours, Round 1 interviews in late September for the top 20 percent, and Round 2 interviews in early October. COHORT: starts 18 January 2027. Deadline 13 September 2026 at 23:59 Anywhere on Earth.
The British Open-ended Learning and Discovery (BOLD) Lab is a new UKRI-funded initiative establishing an AI research laboratory led from the University of Oxford, bringing more than 80 researchers from Oxford, UCL and Imperial College London under one vision. It carries an initial investment of around GBP 8 million with the potential for a further GBP 22 million extending the investment over six years, making it one of the UK's largest bets on fundamental AI research. The lab's remit is ambitious, high-risk work on the fundamental science of artificial intelligence, alongside training future leaders in the field. THE ROLE: up to 12 BOLD Fellows are being recruited across the three universities. Fellows are expected to operate with a high level of independence and responsibility, setting their own research direction, publishing at the highest level, and mentoring junior researchers and doctoral students. They also play a leading role in managing the lab and take responsibility for developing its strategic and scientific direction, with primary responsibility for a programme of independent funded research projects. The posting frames the draw as exceptional independence, direct collaboration with world-leading colleagues across the three institutions, access to substantial and rapidly growing compute, and real influence over the intellectual direction and culture of a major national lab. WHO SHOULD APPLY: senior researchers with an established, original research track record in AI or a closely related field, who are a recognised authority in their area. HOW TO APPLY: submit an online application with a covering letter or supporting statement, a CV, and details of two referees. Informal enquiries are welcomed beforehand to the BOLD Exec Team at boldexec-team@eng.ox.ac.uk. NOTE: this is a salaried fixed-term research post rather than a grant. Only applications received before midday on Tuesday 15 September 2026 can be considered.
The ILIAD Fellowship is a 3-month mentored research fellowship producing concrete outputs in applied-mathematical AI alignment research, distinct from ILIAD's four-week taught Intensive. Fellows work in person in London or the SF Bay Area with a USD 6,000 per month travel-and-housing allowance. ELIGIBILITY: primarily PhD and postdoc researchers in mathematics, theoretical physics, theoretical computer science or related fields, though a degree is not a hard requirement given substantial research experience; limited remote flexibility. DEADLINES: 21 September 2026 for the November cohort (2 November 2026 to 5 February 2027); 19 October 2026 for the December cohort (1 December 2026 to 5 March 2027). A single common application at iliad.ac/apply covers the Fellowship and the Intensive.
The Centre for Democratic Resilience (CeDR) at the University of Oxford is hiring a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Computational Social Science and Text Analysis to join an interdisciplinary team building a new computational research agenda on risks to academic freedom, institutional autonomy, and higher education governance. The fellow leads computational analysis of large collections of legal, regulatory, and political texts, developing innovative NLP methods to analyse legislation, policy documents, and political discourse, with particular attention to Germany. REQUIREMENTS: a doctorate (held or near completion) in political science or a related field, with expertise in computational social science and natural language processing. TERMS: full-time, fixed-term for three years, based in Oxford, salary GBP 39,424 to 51,983. APPLICATION: online via the University of Oxford job pages with CV and supporting statement (job reference 188420); online interviews the week of 5 October 2026. Start 1 November 2026 or soon after. NOTE: this is a salaried research job, not a grant. DEADLINE: 25 September 2026, 12 noon UK time.
Tate, in collaboration with Delfina Foundation, invites applications for the thirteenth Brooks International Fellowship Programme: two 6-month fellowships in 2027 for international researchers based outside the UK, hosted in the Tate Britain Curatorial Division and complemented by activities and residency life at Delfina Foundation. FELLOWSHIP 1, Leonora Carrington: Art and the Theatre of Life: foundational research into the British-Mexican artist's interest in theatre, performance and performativity, locating, analysing and contextualising theatrical materials across archives, manuscripts, correspondence, photographs and ephemera, and situating them within Carrington's transnational career; a Fellow with knowledge of the Mexican social-political context, culture and performance histories of the second half of the twentieth century is particularly well placed. FELLOWSHIP 2, Artist Supported Studios: contributing to research and development of the 2028 Tate Britain Commission through the lens of artists who work with supported studios (organisations enabling disabled and neurodivergent artists to develop sustained professional practices), exploring how galleries, commissioned artists and supported studios can develop different forms of communication and ways of working through the commissioning process, how collaborative practices can be documented and interpreted while remaining attentive to artistic agency, and how the research can shape future institutional practice. Fellows live at Delfina Foundation with a desk in their room plus hot-desking, work at Tate Britain, collaborate across Tate sites, get access to Tate's collection, archive, staff and networks, and present their practice at Tate and Delfina events. APPLICATION: download and return the Word application form from the Tate jobs page (only returned Word forms are accepted; nothing is filled in online). DEADLINE: Wednesday 21 October 2026, 17:00 GMT.
Whose Archive is it Anyway? is the first in a three-part series of events at The Photographers' Gallery exploring the future of archives and archiving. This one-day event on Friday 16 April 2027 kickstarts the conversation with commissioned talks addressing what it means to make an archive today, who decides what an archive consists of, who creates an archive, who an archive is for, and who has access. The gallery welcomes submissions of real-life experiences rather than academic papers that challenge or answer these or other points related to the future of archives. SUGGESTED TOPICS: artist and photographers' legacies; institutional archives; memory (forgotten or lost histories made visible again); truth within archives (who is telling the stories and how); ownership (who has the authority to tell stories, who owns the images and their stories); relationships between those who create archives and those who use them; radical, non-traditional archives that redesign how stories are gathered and held to safeguard living memories; family archives; reclaimed photographic archives; counter archives that question dominant historical narratives; grassroots archives; technologies that reduce barriers to archives while safeguarding material; digital preservation and digitisation; and dialogic archives. ELIGIBILITY: open to all, especially those with experience of working with archives and the stories within them; applicants must be 18 or older and available to attend The Photographers' Gallery in London on 16 April 2027 to speak at the event. Selected speakers receive a fee of GBP 200 and will be notified by 18 January 2027. Questions to archive@tpg.org.uk. Deadline 1 November 2026, 11:59pm GMT.
The ILIAD Intensive is a four-week, full-time, in-person program for mathematically strong researchers interested in foundational AI alignment, running in London (at LISA) and in Berkeley. It runs five days a week, 10am to 6pm, in cohorts of 15 to 30 participants. CURRICULUM, across five clusters: Alignment (decomposing the alignment problem, pretraining, post-training and deployment, reward learning); Learning (deep learning theory, singular learning theory, training dynamics); Abstractions, Representations and Interpretability (mechanistic interpretability, natural latents); Agency (reinforcement learning, decision theory, agent foundations); and Safety Guarantees (debate, steganography, the limits of interpretability). MONEY: no tuition is charged. Each participant receives a USD 5,000 travel and housing allowance, office space at the venue, and lunch and dinner five days a week. Participants book and pay for their own travel and accommodation out of the allowance. ELIGIBILITY: a strong mathematical background, typically graduate-level study or a completed degree in mathematics, physics or theoretical computer science, though mathematical maturity is weighted more heavily than specific credentials. Research experience, general competence and motivation are also assessed. Prior machine learning or alignment experience is not required. DEADLINE: no fixed closing date is published. A single application covers several upcoming programs and applicants indicate their preferred dates and locations; applications are being accepted for the October 2026 and November 2026 cohorts. HOW TO APPLY: through the application portal at iliad.ac/apply. Questions to contact@iliad.ac.