American Council of Learned Societies Announces 2022 ACLS Fellowships

The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2022 ACLS Fellowships.

The ACLS Fellowship program supports exceptional scholarship in the humanities and interpretive social sciences that has the potential to make significant contributions within and beyond their fields. This year, the program will award more than $3.7 million to 60 scholars selected from nearly 1,000 applicants through a rigorous, multi-stage peer review process.

As with the 2021 competition, this year the ACLS Fellowship program focuses its support on early-career, untenured scholars, many of whom are facing significant disruption to their research and career ambitions due to the widespread social and economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Half of this year’s fellows are working outside of the tenure track.

“This year ACLS is proud to continue focusing our support on exceptional early career scholars,” said ACLS President Joy Connolly. “In a challenging time, the projects of this diverse cohort, who are working in public and private colleges and universities and as independent scholars, illuminate critically important dimensions of human culture and society. Civil rights law, aesthetic theory, environmental history, the history of musical theater, political philosophy, and migration: these are just a few of the areas explored by ACLS Fellows this year — demonstrating the richness of humanistic research across all fields of the humanities and the interpretive social sciences.”

ACLS Fellowship awards provide $30,000 to $60,000 to support scholars during six to 12 months of research leave. Awardees who do not hold tenure-track faculty appointments during the fellowship year also receive an additional $5,000 stipend for research or other personal costs incurred during their award term.

The 2022 fellows are pursuing in-depth studies of a diverse range of topics spanning time periods, geographies, and cultures. Their projects include a transdisciplinary study of ice and arctic geographies in Indigenous literature and politics; an investigation of religious change and urban transformation in Early Modern Cambodia; and an exploration of race, performance, and temporality in Black expressive culture.

Learn more about the 2022 ACLS Fellows and their projects.

The ACLS Fellowship program is funded primarily by ACLS’s endowment, which has benefited from contributions by the Mellon Foundation, Arcadia Charitable Trust, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the ACLS Research University Consortium and college and university Associates, and the generous gifts of fellows and friends of ACLS.