FAQ: Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship

ORCID offers a persistent digital identifier (an ORCID iD) that you as an individual scholar own and control, and that distinguishes you from every other researcher. ORCID is being implemented by publishers around the world. In some countries with centralized funding structures, ORCID is in even greater use than it is in the United States. Ten million researchers have created their own ORCIDs.

Learn more about ORCID at https://orcid.org/.

ACLS is joining higher education organizations and funders in encouraging the use of ORCID, which will strengthen academic infrastructure and our relationships with constituencies throughout the academic world.

The benefits for scholars are numerous: having a persistent ID for applicants and fellows could be helpful to scholars whose scholarly record is attributed differently over time (due to differences between Roman and non-Roman characters or because a scholar’s name changes as a result of marriage, divorce, or transitions in gender identification). Faculty with adjunct or other contract employment also benefit from having a persistent and non-institutionally based identity, since institutions do not follow any standard record-keeping on their public websites.

In future years, we hope to integrate more of an applicant’s ORCID record data into the application process, saving them time and effort. For now, we believe that simply requiring ORCID registration is a great first step.

https://orcid.org/

While it only takes a minute to sign up for an account, we advise applicants for ACLS fellowships and grants to register with ORCID before beginning their online applications.

No, not for the purposes of the current ACLS fellowship and grant competitions. You should control your ORCID privacy settings in the way that makes you most comfortable. You can review ORCID’s full privacy policy at https://info.orcid.org/privacy-policy/.

You are only required to register for the ID; how much information you add to your profile is entirely up to you. You can learn more about the benefits of having and using an ORCID profile at https://info.orcid.org/benefits-for-researchers/.

Yes, an applicant to this fellowship may also apply to as many fellowship programs as are suitable. However, not more than one ACLS or ACLS-joint award may normally be accepted in any one competition year.

No, eligibility for this program is not restricted based on citizenship or permanent residency. Any doctoral student who is pursuing a PhD in the humanities or social sciences at degree-granting institutions in the United States is eligible to apply.

Yes, but unsuccessful applicants may reapply to this program only once.

For the purposes of the 2024-25 competition year, the eligibility criteria are designed to support doctoral students who are at the earliest stages of dissertation project design, so that they can undertake exploratory, experimental, expansive research. (In other words, scholars who will be immediately pre-candidacy or who have very recently become doctoral candidates/ABD at the time of the award in 2025.)

In order to be eligible for this fellowship in the 2024-25 competition year, you must not have advanced to PhD candidacy prior to January 1, 2024. It is essential that you indicate your expected ABD date in the application, and your expected date of earning the PhD. This will help ACLS program staff determine your eligibility. ACLS also provides space within the application where you can describe any disruptions to your progress that would extend the timeline to degree. If you have any questions about your eligibility, please contact ACLS program staff at [email protected].

Possibly. The answer to this question depends on other factors in your progress to degree, such as a leave of absence from your program for family or medical leave, or a “resetting” of your timeline due to a formal move from one PhD program/department to another. Please fill in all requested fields in the education section of the application and use the space allotted to describe any special circumstances that have affected your progress to degree. As a reminder, ACLS is seeking to support scholars who are at the earliest stages of dissertation project design. The program is not designed to support graduate students whose dissertation research and/or writing is well underway or advanced.

Yes, as long as you advanced to ABD status no earlier than January 1, 2024.

ACLS requires that prospective awardees be able to take up a full year (9-12 months) of sustained specialized research and training, released from normal coursework, assistantships, and teaching responsibilities. Fellowship funds may not be captured by fellows’ home institution for the payment of fees or tuition. Please direct the director of graduate studies, department chair, or dean who will be completing your institutional statement form to write to [email protected] with any questions about this requirement. (It is likely your institution has managed such requirements related to an ACLS fellowship or grant in the past, and we can provide that information to them.) In any case, we encourage you to submit your application by the deadline, even if these issues are still being sorted out between ACLS and your institution; we want to make it possible for graduate students from across US higher education to take advantage of this fellowship opportunity.

ACLS requires that prospective awardees be able to take up a full year (9-12 months) of sustained specialized research and training, released from normal coursework, assistantships, and teaching responsibilities. We also require the fellow to be enrolled as a student during the fellowship year, so they can maintain access to university resources and health insurance. As we designed this new program in consultation with our funding partner, it was agreed that we would not allow the fellowship stipend to cover tuition and fees. We know that each institution has a variety of ways of managing a student’s enrollment status and funding packages. If you are a university representative with questions about this requirement, please email [email protected].

We do not require that your institution provide guaranteed funding during your PhD program. We determine eligibility based on the number of years you have completed in your program, regardless of funding status.

No, you may work on it in multiple sessions, though you will need to save your work after you finish each section of the application. Once you have submitted the application, you cannot work on it again.

No, your application will be judged as it is at the time of submission.

Notifications and other correspondence are sent via email from “acls.org” addresses. In order to prevent ACLS emails from being blocked, we suggest that applicants and letter writers:

1. Add the relevant ACLS email addresses (e.g., [email protected], [email protected], and [email protected] for letter writers) to their address book or safe senders list.
2. Check spam or junk mail folder for notifications and correspondence if you are expecting them.
3. In the event that you continue not to receive ACLS emails in either your inbox or spam/junk folder, it may be that your institution (“.edu”) or internet service provider (“.com” or “.net” email) is blocking these emails before they reach you. Please contact the appropriate personnel, e.g., your IT department, so that they may resolve the issue.

In your application timeline you should include the permit(s) required for the proposed project and the estimated date(s) by which you expect to secure them. Your knowledge of the required permits will help demonstrate your awareness of the ethical and social context of your research. Reviewers will use this information to evaluate whether your project is feasible and whether you are prepared to begin conducting research. Depending on the research context, examples of permits include research visas, approvals or exemptions from institutional review boards and other ethics committees, human subject approvals, animal care and use approvals, government clearances, excavation permits, letters of affiliation, and permissions from the local scientific, academic, museum, institutional, or tribal authorities who oversee your research area. Please do not contact ACLS to ask which permits you need; instead, consult with your contacts and/or advisors.

Yes, although it must meet our formatting requirements: no more than fifteen pages total, double spaced, including any images and footnotes or endnotes, in Arial or Helvetica 11-point font. Excerpts from publications that do not meet the formatting guidelines will not be accepted. An application containing a writing sample that does not conform to stated length and formatting requirements will be deemed ineligible for the competition.

Your writing sample’s status (published or unpublished) has no bearing on your success in the competition.

Yes, your writing sample can be a co-authored paper, but please allocate some space at the beginning of the sample to describe your role in the project and in authoring the paper.

The personal statement is a brief narrative (no more than two pages, double spaced, in Arial or Helvetica 11-point font) describing your journey as a scholar and how your work comes together at the nexus of personal experience, research interests, and desire to shift the forms and formats of academic research.

The goal of this statement is to help our peer reviewers understand the connection between the scholar and their project. (Scholarship is not conducted in a vacuum of perfect detachment, devoid of personal perspective and experience.) You might choose to include information about your motivations for pursuing a particular topic of study or methodology, or how your teaching and working conditions inform your approach to your proposed research, or other information about you that would illuminate your trajectory as a scholar. Please note that ACLS offers space elsewhere in the application form for you to provide information about delays to your progress or any related difficulties you have had in fulfilling your department’s expected time to degree.

ACLS welcomes proposals from scholars and scholarly projects representing a wide variety of topics, time periods and geographic locations. Successful applicants will connect their research interest to important questions of broad interest in the humanities and demonstrate how they are planning to approach research and teaching on the proposed topic in a way that is responsive to diverse publics and diverse groups of students.

Yes. Applicants must use this template and can download it here.

Yes, you may request feedback generated through ACLS’s peer review process by writing to [email protected] with the subject line “Request for feedback –” followed by your full name, e.g. “Request for feedback – Jane Q. Applicant.” Requests for comments from the 2023-24 competition must be received by June 30, 2024.

Due to the number of requests ACLS receives each year, and the work of administering new fellowships each spring, we do not begin processing feedback until the summer, after the competition year is complete. Thank you for your patience.

Please also note that feedback is made available at the discretion of each reviewer. Comments may not be available from every reviewer who assessed your application. We encourage peer reviewers to provide constructive feedback to applicants looking to improve on their ideas or how they express those ideas; comments are not an explanation or rationale for why an application was not selected for an award. Such feedback also is not intended to be directions that, if followed, would lead necessarily to greater success in future competitions. After all, the pool of reviewers changes every year, as does the pool of applications.

Working with an external mentor is a key aspect of the fellowship. We expect fellows to engage a mentor who will offer critical advice and perspectives on their plans for knowledge creation and circulation. In the interest of building out a fellow’s network, the external mentor must stand outside of current advising relationships within your program or department. ACLS asks that mentors be designated by the start of the fellowship term and will assist with connecting fellow and mentor as needed.

Professional development funds may be used to support skills acquisition, training, or additional research expenses to support innovative/expansive directions. This may include tuition or registration fees for particular trainings or courses, reimbursement for research participants or external consultants, or necessary research materials or equipment to conduct your research.