ACLS Community Message for December 2024

Greetings!

Stewardship of knowledge is our mission at ACLS. Like stewards of woods in a dry season, we are seeing a range of immediate and long-term threats to the creation and circulation of knowledge, from cuts in research funding to legislative censorship. The strategic plan we’re developing this year articulates a collaborative vision of what stewardship is under challenging conditions. Today, on Giving Tuesday, I hope you will support our effort to be the best stewards of knowledge we can be.

Scholars like Ehlimana Memišević G’23, an assistant professor of the faculty of law at the University of Sarajevo who works on migration and Islam in Europe, combat disinformation and prejudice with historical knowledge. Knowledge like hers needs infrastructure designed with attention to free exchange. Our Summer Institute for the Study of East Central and Southeastern Europe gives these scholars the networking power they need to help level the unequal playing-field of global scholarship. Ehlimana’s cohort, whom I was lucky to get to know over two weeks in Bulgaria last year, commented repeatedly on the obstacles to gaining visibility for their work, even if it is written in English. ACLS helps give outstanding scholars the visibility they deserve.

Within the United States, as politicized cuts are being made to the study of history and culture, our work is ever more urgent. When we re-opened our ACLS Fellowship competition to scholars with tenure this past year, the number of applications leapt to nearly twice the previous year’s total. The spike was predictable: opportunities for grants and fellowships are few and sabbaticals are becoming more difficult to secure, even at relatively well-resourced institutions. In this environment, every gift matters.

Your support increases the funds we are able to offer and helps us advocate more effectively for our fields. Our objects of study sometimes seem small, their scope narrow. But as I often find myself telling skeptics, this scale is no different from the sciences, where grand insights and inventions are impossible without the work of detailed observation and small-bore analysis. Just as we invest in scientists to probe genes and atoms to cure diseases and design better fuels, we should invest in humanists and social scientists to read and collect and interpret evidence. Some of the work ACLS supports addresses important contemporary issues like racial prejudice and poverty. Some of it has no obvious connection to the world’s current problems, but it is valuable nonetheless, enriching our understanding of creative acts that bring beauty into the world, of human values and beliefs, of the often surprising past.

I was recently reminded of this while reading an essay in the London Review of Books by Fara Dabhoiwala about a painting of Francis Williams, a Jamaican scholar and gentleman of means whose enslaved parents gained their family’s freedom around 1700, when he was a little boy. On the basis of expert observation and painstaking research, Dabhoiwala argues that the painting represents Williams as he saw himself, as a self-confident mathematician, a peer of Isaac Newton and Edmond Halley. From a cluster of tiny marks in a single unsigned artwork, Dabhoiwala illuminates a chapter of human achievement that would otherwise remain unknown. This is part of the work of a just world: to do justice to the voices of the past. 

Speaking of work, your generosity allows us to better support the executive directors and presidents and other staff of our 81 member learned societies, whose labor on behalf of their disciplines and areas improves conditions for scholars everywhere. I add a big shout of thanks to my ACLS colleagues, who support inclusive, rigorous standards for scholarship in our fellowship and grant competitions, and whose work is much-needed and varied: they provide surveys of field-specific resources to scholars in China studies, offer programs on job market preparation and careers outside of academia, and lift up authors and publishers of exceptional open access humanities scholarship. ACLS consultant Stacy Hartman and former program officer Heather Hewett (who recently returned as planned to her faculty position at SUNY New Paltz) drew on the work they undertook as part of our Building Blocks for a New Academy initiative in this brilliant piece in the LA Review of Books. Check out their terrific success stories about new developments in the humanities, and join them and ACLS in rejecting the siege mentality!

I’m deeply grateful for our partnerships with our philanthropic funders and for gifts from individuals like you. Today I hope you will help us carry on our stewardship of knowledge. It’s easy to lose sight of in the whirl and worries of everyday life — but so very, very important to who we are and who we wish to be. Thank you.

Warm wishes for the holiday season,

Joy

Seminar
By Josephine Miles

Here we have a straining of effort that men can come to 
Once in a while one and another in a still afternoon 
Meeting and sitting quietly and talking quietly.

       Bent upon intent
      The talk labors and is spent
      Answering and asking what is meant.

We have a rote and code and much arbitrary
As base to touch and move out from in pursuit, 
We are breathless with promise of our own conclusion.

       Bent with the need 
      The words take speed
       And we lean and follow where they lead.

If then this is but a circle we are bound for 
And a route that will touch no infinities but this 
One table we sit by as our own circumference,

       Still we spent as blind
      In the next days and most distant nights shall find 
       The clear frame of the circle in the mind.