BARTH FAMILY GIFT SUPPORTS WESTERN HISTORY AT BERKELEY
A generous new donation to the History Department will support the study of the North American West at UC Berkeley. Named in honor of Gunther Barth, a prominent scholar of the North American West and History Faculty at UC Berkeley from 1962-1995, the Barth Fund has been generously endowed by family members, colleagues, former students, and, especially, his widow Ellen Barth to support innovative graduate student research at Cal.
“This wonderfully generous gift will help cement Berkeley’s position as the top graduate program in the country for students working on the history of the North American West,” says Professor Brian DeLay. “We already have one of the nation’s strongest cohorts of faculty working on the West. Together we convene the Berkeley West Seminar for the growing departmental community writing on any aspect of the region’s history. The Barth Fund will empower our students to help define the next generation’s scholarship on the North American West."
The Barth Fund will support expanded programming, a new departmental dissertation prize, and, especially, an annual fellowship competition. Barth Research Fellowships are intended to empower History PhD students at UC Berkeley to be more ambitious with their research agendas. Each year, a faculty selection committee will make several awards, usually between $5000-$9000, to support research on topics relevant to the North American West (defined broadly to include everything west of the Appalachian Mountains and North of the Tropic of Cancer). To submit an application for the inaugural competition, see the Barth Fund Application portal.