ACLS Community in the News: November 2024

Grants and Awards

• Thirty-five individuals have been elected to membership in the American Antiquarian Society (AAS), a 212-year-old national research library and community of learners dedicated to discovering and sharing a deeper understanding of the American past.
• The African Studies Association (ASA) announced the establishment of the ASA Samora & Graça Machel Presidential Fellows Fund to support exceptional scholarship and academic exchange opportunities for African studies scholars.
• The University of New Mexico named Kimberly A. Gauderman F’19 as the 2024 Community Engaged Research Lecture recipient.
• The Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA) has been awarded a two-year $312,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation for a new Academic Freedom Initiative. The initiative will support data collection, analysis, and dissemination of findings regarding academic freedom in the context of scholarship and teaching in Middle East studies.
• The Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College and Bard College’s Human Rights Project appointed Valentina Rozas-Krause F’19 as the 2024–25 Keith Haring Chair in Art and Activism.
• Suzana Sawyer F’17 was awarded the 2024 AES Senior Book Prize for The Small Matter of Suing Chevron by the American Ethnological Society.
• Evie Shockley F’07 has been awarded the Academy of American Poets Fellowship for Distinguished Poetic Achievement.

Leadership Moves

• Richard L. McCormick F’78 has been appointed the interim president of Stony Brook University.
• Peter Struck F’02 has been named the new Stephen A. Levin Family Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania.
• A new center at Yale Law School directed by Keith E. Whittington F’99 aims to become a leading hub for academic freedom and free speech and seeks to safeguard these values for future generations.

Interviews and Op-Eds

• Historian and past ACLS Fellow Robert Paxton F’74 is featured in a New York Times Magazine article about labeling politicians as fascists.
• ACLS Digital Justice Grant project the Slave Societies Digital Archive is featured in an NBC News article on Latino families discovering their ancestry through DNA testing and digitized archives.
• On the RNS State of Belief podcast, Brenda Wineapple F’97 discusses the resurgent threat of censorship and extreme religious influence in America.

To help preserve these histories, Jane Landers, a historian at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, co-founded the Slave Societies Digital Archive in 2003. Today, SlaveSocieties.org offers free access to more than 3,900 digitized volumes of church and business records, totaling more than 750,000 images.

“They’re uncovering their ancestry — and questioning their families’ racial narratives,” NBC News