Lomax, aware of the deficiencies of his early education, still wished to improve himself, however, and on September 26, 1906, he jumped at the chance to attend Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as a graduate student, having previously received a $500 stipend: The Austin Teaching Fellowships. Here he had the opportunity to study under Barrett Wendell and George Lyman Kittredge, two renowned scholars who actively encouraged his interest in cowboy songs. Harvard, in fact, was the center of American folklore studies (then viewed as a subsidiary of English literature, itself a novel field of scholarship in comparison with the more traditional study of rhetoric focused on classical languages and geared to preparing lawyers and clergy). Kittredge, in addition to being a well-known scholar of Chaucer and Shakespeare, had inherited the professorship in English literature previously held by Francis James Child, whose courses he continued to teach and whose great, unfinished eight-volume edition of the "Popular Ballads of England and Scotland" he brought to completion.