Mellon/ACLS Scholars & Society Fellowships

The Mellon/ACLS Scholars & Society program aims to amplify the broad potential of doctoral education in the humanities by supporting doctoral faculty as they pursue publicly engaged scholarship and advocate for diverse professional pathways for emerging PhDs. The program offers opportunities for faculty with fulltime appointments in PhD-granting humanities departments or programs in the United States to engage significant societal questions in their research, serve as ambassadors for humanities scholarship beyond the academy, and deepen their support for innovations in doctoral education on their campuses. Scholars & Society fellowships invite faculty who teach and advise doctoral students to pursue research projects while in residence at a US-based cultural, media, government, policy, or community organization of their choice. Fellows and their colleagues at host institutions are expected to create a mutually beneficial partnership in which they collaborate, interact, and learn about each other’s work, motivating questions, methods, and practices. The Scholars & Society program complements the Mellon/ACLS Public Fellows program, which places recent humanities PhDs in nonprofit and government organizations. The goal of the fellowship year should be to conduct a major research project in the humanities or humanistic social sciences that treats a significant issue or grand challenge in society, such as democratic governance, technological change, racism, climate change, economic inequality, or migration and immigration, to name a few possibilities. The program supports projects at all stages of development and welcomes applications that propose to deepen or expand existing research projects as well as those that propose new projects. While projects should be informed by present-day issues in the public sphere, they need not be contemporary in focus. Indeed, it is assumed that the insights yielded by humanities research focused on earlier time periods can inform work on contemporary challenges. Fellows also are required to participate in two workshops that bookend the fellowship year—the first is designed to help fellows refine their projects and build connections with scholars and institutions engaged in public scholarship; the second, in the spring, will offer a chance for fellows to reflect on their experiences, learn and exchange ideas about innovations in doctoral education, and plan programming for the year following the fellowship. In the 2019-20 competition year, ACLS will award up to 12 Scholars & Society Fellowships for a nine-month term during the 2020-21 academic year. Each fellowship carries a stipend of $75,000, plus funds of up to $6,000 for research, travel/optional relocation, and related project costs. ACLS also will cover the costs of fellows’ attendance at the workshops. Fellows must commit themselves to relocating (if necessary) in order to be in residence for the entire nine-month tenure of the fellowship. The award also carries $10,000 in support for each fellow’s host organization and provides additional funding of up to $15,000 to sponsor on-campus and off-campus programming in the year following the fellowship. The programming, which may take a variety of forms, should draw on connections developed during the fellowship year and should be designed to foster greater understanding of the public value of humanities scholarship and doctoral education beyond the academy. Stipends, research and project costs, and programming budgets will be paid to fellows directly or through their universities.