ACLS Welcomes Deena Ragavan as Senior Program Officer for International Programs

The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) is pleased to welcome Deena Ragavan as Senior Program Officer for International Programs. She officially joined the staff on January 3, 2022.

Ragavan brings crucial experience and capacity to ACLS’s mission to support the development and circulation of humanistic scholarship. As part of the International Programs team, she will help design and implement activities supporting humanities and interpretive social sciences scholars and the communities in which they work. This includes contributing to the administration and management of peer-reviewed fellowship and grant programs, including the ACLS Program in China Studies, The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Program in Buddhist Studies, and the African Humanities Program.

Prior to joining ACLS, Ragavan worked in institutional fundraising and grant writing for a wide range of nonprofit organizations primarily serving under-resourced communities. In that time, she helped raise more than $15 million in funding from public and private sources. Most recently, she served as Senior Development Officer at the Clinton Foundation, where she supported institutional partnerships, grant administration, and strategy for national and international initiatives across diverse sectors, including renewable energy, agricultural development, and early childhood education.

Previously, Ragavan was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago and a Whiting Foundation Dissertation Fellow. She holds a PhD and MA in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from Harvard University.