Mellon/American Councils for Learned Societies Fellowship

Deadline: October 28, 2020

The Mellon/ACLS Scholars and 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 and Society fellowships enable 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 and 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.

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