ACLS Fellowship Program

The American Council of Learned Societies is pleased to name the 2017 ACLS Fellows. This competition saw the program grow to support more scholars than ever before and to provide a higher level of funding for awardees. The set of 71 fellows was selected through ACLS’s rigorous, multi-stage peer-review process from a pool of nearly 1,200 applicants—one of the largest in the history of the program. ACLS also raised the stipend level for awardees at the ranks (or rank equivalents) of assistant and associate professor to $40,000 and $50,000, respectively. The stipend for scholars at the full professor level is $70,000. The fellowships support scholars for six to twelve months of full-time research and writing.

“The 2017 ACLS Fellows represent more than 50 colleges and universities and an array of humanities disciplines and methodologies,” said Matthew Goldfeder, ACLS’s director of fellowship programs. “The awardees were selected for their potential to bring new understandings of the human experience and creativity, from antiquity to the present, in contexts across the globe. We are grateful to be able to support the intellectual vitality and rigor of humanistic inquiry at this challenging moment.”

The ACLS Fellowship program, the longest-running of our current fellowship and grant programs, is funded by ACLS’s endowment, which has received contributions from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Council’s Research University Consortium and college and university Associates, past fellows, and individual friends of ACLS.

ACLS Fellows and project titles that touch on the history of science are listed below; for more information about the recipients and their projects, click here.
 
Allison M. Bigelow (Assistant Professor of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese, University of Virginia) Cultural Touchstones: Mining, Refining, and the Languages of Empire in the Early Americas

Sarah Bridger (Associate Professor of History, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo) Science in the Seventies: Battling for the Soul of a Profession, from the Vietnam War to Star Wars
ACLS/New York Public Library Fellow

Matthew Howard Hersch (Assistant Professor of History of Science, Harvard University) Abort to Orbit
ACLS/Oscar Handlin Fellow

Evan Ragland (Assistant Professor of History, University of Notre Dame) Experimental Life: Medicine, Science, and the Emergence of a Culture of Experiment

Suzana M. Sawyer (Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of California, Davis) Suing Chevron: Law, Science, and Contamination in Ecuador and Beyond

Benjamin Robert Siegel (Assistant Professor of History, Boston University) The Nation in Pain: American Bodies and Indian Pharmaceuticals in an Age of Distress

Paolo Squatriti (Professor of History, Romance Languages and Literatures, and the Environment, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor) Pleasing Plants and Worrisome Weeds: Botanical Change in Early Medieval Europe

Justin Stearns (Associate Professor of Arab Crossroads Studies, New York University Abu Dhabi) Islamic Thought and the Natural World in the Early Modern Maghreb: Revealed Science in the Age of al-Hasan al-Yusi

Bharat Jayram Venkat (Assistant Professor of Anthropology, University of Oregon) India after Antibiotics: Tuberculosis at the Limits of Cure
 
Contact: Matthew Goldfeder, 212-697-1505 x124

The American Council of Learned Societies, a private, nonprofit federation of 74 national scholarly organizations, is the preeminent representative of American scholarship in the humanities and related social sciences. Advancing scholarship by awarding fellowships and strengthening relations among learned societies is central to ACLS’s work. This year, ACLS will award more than $18 million to over 300 scholars across a variety of humanistic disciplines.