The American Council of Learned Societies is pleased to announce the inaugural recipients of the Mellon/ACLS Scholars & Society Fellowship. The fellowships offer faculty who teach and advise PhD students opportunities to serve as ambassadors for humanities scholarship beyond the academy and deepen their support for doctoral curricular innovation on their campuses. The awards are made possible by a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Scholars & Society Fellows conduct research projects in the humanities or humanistic social sciences while in residence at cultural, media, government, policy, or community organizations of their choice. The awards promote mutually beneficial partnerships between fellows and their colleagues at the host institutions, through which they can collaborate, interact, and learn about each other’s work, motivating questions, methods, and practices.
Among this year’s projects are a collaboration with the Cambridge city government to explore approaches to equitable and sustainable transit design; a study that illuminates the lived experiences of migrants in detention in the United States; and a partnership with the Utah AIDS Foundation to chronicle the challenges that faced the only doctor in the state willing to treat HIV positive patients and the nuns of Holy Cross Church who ministered to Utahns living with AIDS.
Fellows are selected through multi-disciplinary peer review on the basis of the strength of their proposed projects and their commitment to connecting their community engaged scholarship with doctoral education at their institutions. The fellowships offer a stipend of $75,000 plus $6,000 for research and project costs, as well as additional funding in the year following the fellowship for programming on the fellows’ campuses that promotes the public value of humanities scholarship. Fellows also take part in workshops on best practices for public scholarship and doctoral curricular innovation in the humanities.
The ASA members among the 2019 Mellon/ACLS Scholars & Society Fellows are:
Ralina L. Joseph (Associate Professor, Communication, University of Washington)
Interrupting Privilege
In residence at the Northwest African American Museum, Seattle, WA
Sunaina Maira (Professor, Asian American Studies, University of California, Davis)
Sanctuary, Solidarity, and Missing Stories: Arab Immigrants and Refugees in the Trump Era
In residence at the Arab Resource and Organizing Center, San Francisco, CA
Elizabeth Son (Associate Professor, Theatre, Northwestern University)
Possessing History: Korean Diasporic Women and the Performance of Persistence
In residence at KAN-WIN: Empowering Women in the Asian American Community, Chicago, IL
Learn more about the fellows’ projects and host organizations here.
Contact: fellowships@acls.org
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