ACLS Fellowships in Humanities and Interpretive Social Sciences 2025-2026 (Up to US $60,000)

ACLS invites research proposals from scholars in all disciplines of the humanities and interpretive social sciences. In the 2024-25 competition cycle, the program will award up to 60 fellowships to scholars across all stages of the scholarly career. Approximately half of this year’s awards will support early-career scholars.

ACLS welcomes applications from scholars pursuing research on topics grounded in any time period, world region, or humanistic methodology. ACLS aims to select fellows who are broadly representative of the variety of humanistic scholarship across all fields of study. We also believe that diversity enhances scholarship and seek to recognize academic excellence from all sectors of higher education and beyond. In ACLS’s peer review, funding packages, and engagement with fellows, we aspire to enact our values of equity and inclusion.

The ultimate goal of the project should be a major piece of scholarly work by the applicant, which can take the form of a monograph, articles, publicly engaged humanities project, digital research project, critical edition, or other scholarly resources. The fellowships support projects at any stage of development – beginning, middle, or end. This program does not fund works of fiction (e.g., novels or films), textbooks, straightforward translation (without significant scholarly interpretation and apparatus), or projects that are primarily pedagogical in focus.

• Table of Content
• About American Council of Learned Societies
• ACLS Fellowships
• Aim and Benefits of ACLS Fellowships
• ACLS Fellowships Courses
• Requirements for ACLS Fellowships Qualification
• Interview date, Process and Venue for ACLS Fellowships
• Application Deadline
• How to Apply

About American Council of Learned Societies

Formed in 1919, ACLS is a nonprofit federation of 81 scholarly organizations. As the preeminent representative of American scholarship in the humanities and interpretive social sciences, ACLS holds a core belief that knowledge is a public good.

ACLS Fellowships

Application Deadline	25 Sep 2024
Value	$60,000
Country to study	United States
Type	Fellowship
Course to study	View courses
Sponsor	American Council of Learned Societies
Gender	Men and Women

Aim and Benefits of ACLS Fellowships

The fellowship stipend is set at $60,000 for a 12-month fellowship. Awards of shorter duration will be prorated at $5,000 per month, with the minimum award set at $30,000. ACLS provides award supplements of between $3,000-$6,000 for independent scholars, adjunct faculty, and faculty with teaching-intensive roles for costs incurred during the fellowship term, including research support, access to manuscript development workshops, learned society conference attendance, health insurance, or child- or eldercare.

 

ACLS Fellowships Courses

• Humanities and Interpretive Social Sciences

Requirements for ACLS Fellowships Qualification

Applicants must:

1. Be US citizens, permanent residents, Indigenous individuals residing in the United States through rights associated with the Jay Treaty of 1794, DACA recipients, asylees, refugees, or individuals granted Temporary Protected Status in the United States. In addition, foreign nationals who have been living in the United States or US territories for three or more years before the application deadline are also eligible, provided that they do not establish permanent residence outside the United States during the period of the fellowship.
2. Have earned a PhD in the humanities or interpretive social sciences no later than the application deadline. (An established scholar who can demonstrate the equivalent of a PhD in publications and professional experience may also qualify. See FAQ for more information).
3. Devote six to twelve months to full-time research and/or writing during the award period, to be initiated between July 1, 2025, and July 1, 2026, and to be completed by December 31, 2026. Please see FAQ for more information, including additional options for scholars holding contingent faculty positions.

 

Interview date, Process and Venue for ACLS Fellowships

Peer reviewers are asked to be mindful of ACLS’s commitment to inclusive excellence, and of how equity and diversity are integral components of merit. We are especially interested in supporting scholars who hail from diverse institutions and groups that are underrepresented in the academy. Reviewers in this program are asked to evaluate all eligible proposals on the following five criteria:

1. The potential of the project to advance the field or fields of study in which it is proposed and make an original and significant contribution to knowledge.
2. The quality and innovativeness of the proposal with regard to its methodology, scope, theoretical framework, and grounding in the relevant scholarly literature. ACLS welcomes applications that challenge scholarly orthodoxy.
3. The feasibility of the project and the likelihood that the applicant will execute the work within the proposed time frame.
4. The scholarly record and career trajectory of the applicant, taking into account relative advantages and constraints on resources for the proposed project and over the course of the applicant’s career.
5. The potential of the award to advance ACLS’s commitment to inclusive excellence, which is based on the principle that humanistic scholarship benefits from institutional diversity and the inclusion of voices that have been historically underrepresented in the academy due to race, gender, class and other aspects of identity.

Tenure of the fellowship may begin no earlier than July 1, 2025, and no later than July 1, 2026.

The fellowship term must conclude no later than December 31, 2026. ACLS Fellowships are intended to help scholars devote six to twelve months to full-time research and writing. The awards are portable and are tenable at any appropriate site for research.

An ACLS Fellowship may be held concurrently with other fellowships and grants and institutional support (such as sabbatical pay) within limits pre-set by ACLS each competition year. See the FAQ for further information about the expectations of the award term and our rules for limits on concurrent sources of support. 

Application Deadline

September 25, 2024

How to Apply

Interested and qualified? Go to American Council of Learned Societies on ofa.acls.org to apply

Applications must be submitted online and must include the components listed below. All uploads must have margins of one inch on all sides and use Arial or Helvetica 11-point font. Applicants may use any standard citation style in their proposal narrative or writing sample, although citations (footnotes or endnotes) are included in the page count for either document. Applications that do not adhere to stated formatting guidelines will be excluded from review.

• Completed application form.
• Proposal (no more than five pages, double spaced, in Arial or Helvetica 11-point font, inclusive of any footnotes or endnotes).
• Up to two additional pages of images, musical scores, or other similar supporting non-text materials (optional).
• Work plan (no more than one page, in double-spaced text or in a timeline/chart format, in Arial or Helvetica 11-point font). The work plan should clearly outline the work to be undertaken over the course of the fellowship term and demonstrate how this work fits into the overall trajectory of the project. Ideally, the work plan will give peer reviewers a sense of which aspects of the proposed work the applicant will be doing when, and where.
• Bibliography (without annotation, no more than two pages, in Arial or Helvetica 11-point font).
• Publications list (no more than two pages, in Arial or Helvetica 11-point font).
• A brief personal statement of up to one page (double spaced, in Arial or Helvetica 11-point font) describing your intellectual trajectory as a scholar.
• A brief writing sample (no more than five pages total, single spaced, including any footnotes or endnotes, in Arial or Helvetica 11-point font), including a brief description of context and the sample’s relation to the proposed project.
• In the 2024-25 competition year, this program will not accept reference letters.

Please note: ACLS requires all applicants to have an ORCID iD. Learn more.

For more details visit: ACLS website.