Blakemore Foundation

Blakemore Freeman Fellowships fund a year of advanced language study abroad for college graduates using an East or Southeast Asian language in their careers. 

Blakemore Refresher Grants are short-term grants available to former Blakemore Freeman Fellows and other post-graduate professionals.

The next deadline for applications is December 30, 2009.  Please refer to our language grant main page for grant guidelines and eligibility requirements, and our FAQ page, which has answers to many common questions.  Application forms are printed from this website.

It’s not just a matter of improvement, but rather more like having blinders lifted. I was a Chinese History Ph.D. student before I received the Blakemore grant and thought I had pretty much reached the level of Chinese I needed for research.
I passively accepted the fact that Chinese was a confoundedly difficult language and there wasn’t much I could do about it. Now I walk down the aisles of books in the East Asian Reading Room and everything seems clear – I look at sources I struggled with a year ago, and the characters melt and give up their meanings. Inscrutable tomes are now full of stories. I no longer sit at a desk under the suspicious gaze of the librarian, pretending I understand what I’m looking at. Now I do understand. I read the papers. I seize random books from the shelves and pore through them. It is wonderful.

- excerpt from final report of Blakemore language grant recipient