ACLS Member Society News: April 2025

Read the latest news and updates from ACLS member societies. The 81 learned societies that are members of ACLS are each focused on a distinct field of study in the humanities and interpretive sciences. Learned societies are vitally important in setting standards of excellence and promoting research, writing, and education.

• ACLS member societies respond to executive orders impacting higher education.
• Approved by the American Academy of Religion (AAR) Board on January 26, 2025, the “AAR Guidelines for Supporting and Evaluating Public Scholarship in Religion” provide strategies and recommendations for creating standards that recognize, assess, and reward public scholarship as scholarship (not only as teaching or service) within the critical study of religion.
• The American Antiquarian Society (AAS) has received an unprecedented gift of more than 18,000 pieces of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ephemera. Meticulously organized and preserved, this new collection at AAS provides an important window into the history of American enterprise and the vast social, economic, and political changes that took place in the nineteenth century.
• American Historical Association (AHA) Executive Director Jim Grossman was quoted in the New York Times and appeared on NPR’s All Things Considered and Morning Edition on the work of the Smithsonian and its importance to the public.
• Watch a recent webinar from the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies (AABS) on “The Fate of Europe: Ukraine, the Baltic Region, and Collective Security.”
• Camila González Simon, member of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP), and her press HAMBRE HAMBRE HAMBRE were awarded the inaugural Printed Matter Publisher Work Grant. HAMBRE HAMBRE HAMBRE is a lesbian-led publishing initiative based in Santiago, Chile, dedicated to amplifying the voices of Latin American women and the queer community
• The National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), along with the Library of Congress, announced new resources for classroom teachers teaching with primary sources. Their co-published book Working with Primary Sources in the English Language Arts Classroom is a peer-reviewed collection of teaching ideas and assignments that details ways in which ELA teachers have taught their students to examine library sources critically.