Grants and Writing Resources for James Madison University
A JMU student is spending the fall 2026 semester in Antwerp as a Gilman-McCain Scholar. The award is one of four Gilman and Gilman-McCain scholarships on the university's 2025-2026 fellowship record, each for a study abroad program in 2026.
Travel and Research Grants
The Office of Student Awards, Initiatives, and Research (STAIR) pays for trips to present accepted work at conferences, meetings and creative competitions. Its Undergraduate Travel Grant Award is $250 for regional travel and $700 for national or international travel. The Graduate Travel Grant Award is $250 regional, $700 national and $1,000 international. Both require the student to be a named author or presenter and to attend in person, and each student gets one grant per academic year.
Graduate students doing optional work outside the United States for JMU credit, thesis and dissertation credit included, can apply through the Center for Global Engagement for The Graduate School's $1,000 Global Opportunity Grant. It covers research costs, supplies, housing and travel, and it needs an endorsement from the program director or advisor.
Where Student Work Appears
The James Madison Undergraduate Research Journal (JMURJ) is student-run and peer-reviewed. It takes undergraduate work from every field at JMU on a rolling basis, with separate guidelines for text and multimedia submissions, and its articles have been downloaded more than 400,000 times.
Graduate students present at the Showcase of Graduate Student Scholarship & Creative Activities, in talks, posters, installations and performances, with prizes for the best oral and poster presentations. The Three Minute Thesis asks for a talk on thesis or dissertation research delivered from memory with one static slide. For the January 2027 round the prizes are $750, $500 and $250, and The Graduate School sponsors the first-place winner to attend the regional competition at the Conference of Southern Graduate Schools.
Prizes for Theses and Dissertations
Advisors nominate finished work for The Graduate School's Outstanding Dissertation Award and Outstanding Thesis/Project Award. Both recognize superior scholarship, research and writing, and each program may put forward one document. The dissertation award also covers MFA documents. In 2026 the winners came from strategic leadership studies and music for dissertations, and from communication and advocacy and psychological sciences for theses.
For national awards, the Office of Fellowships and Awards keeps a searchable database and an application toolkit with guides to personal statements and recommendation letters.
Writing Help and Scholarly Commons
The University Writing Center (UWC) is on the first floor of the Student Success Center. It offers 30- and 60-minute sessions, face to face or online, and lists undergraduates, graduate students, faculty and staff among its clients. Consultants see theses and dissertations, personal statements, scholarship applications and articles for publication. Group projects are welcome too.
Graduate writers follow The Graduate School's scholarly documents process. A committee director from the program's full-time faculty and at least two more members oversee the work. Formatting follows the Scholarly Document Manual, which no other style guide can override unless the adviser requires it and the dean approves. Every thesis, research project and dissertation is submitted to JMU Scholarly Commons, and doctoral students send dissertations to ProQuest only after Scholarly Commons approval.
Our editors can read a thesis or dissertation against the Scholarly Document Manual for grammar, consistency and format before it goes to Scholarly Commons. See our James Madison University dissertation and thesis editing and James Madison University essay editing pages, or write to editors@editorsforstudents.com.
From Our Writing Guides
Compiled by James Peterson Brown, PhD, Managing Editor of Editors For Students. Links checked October 2026.
Editors For Students is an independent editorial service and is not affiliated with James Madison University, and your faculty may endorse our services individually. We look forward to helping you bring your JMU writing to its strongest, submission-ready form.