American Council of Learned Societies Awards 62 ACLS Fellowships
The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2025 ACLS Fellowships. The longest running program at the organization, ACLS Fellowships support outstanding scholarship in the humanities and social sciences. This year, the program will award more than $3.5 million to 62 scholars selected from a pool of over 2,300 applicants through a multi-stage peer review process.
After four years of restricting ACLS Fellowships to early-career scholars due to the impact of COVID-19, the 2024 competition was re-opened to scholars across all career stages. ACLS remains committed to devoting significant resources to early career scholars. Over half of 2025 ACLS Fellowships were awarded to early-career scholars, and nearly a quarter awarded to scholars who do not hold tenure-track faculty appointments.
“ACLS is grateful that we are in a position to continue to fund this vital research that advances our understanding of human societies and cultures,” said ACLS Vice President James Shulman. “Representing many different fields of study—including African diaspora studies, art history, English, gender studies, musicology, philosophy, religious studies, and more—this year’s fellows demonstrate the importance of foundational humanistic inquiry in helping us to understand a wide range of questions concerning our collective and varied histories, narratives, creations, and beliefs.”
ACLS Fellowships provide up to $60,000 to support scholars for six to 12 months of full-time research and writing. Awardees who are independent scholars, adjunct faculty, or have teaching-intensive roles receive an additional stipend between $3,000 and $6,000.
The 2025 fellows include scholars based at public and private research universities, liberal arts colleges, community colleges, and a museum. Their projects include an examination of how Black philosophers in the 1950s and 1960s shaped modern political discourse, a study of environmental citizenship in the Soviet Union post-World War II, research on how Indigenous creatives in film and literature reclaim the horror genre, and a study of ancient tenon head sculptures as markers of social memory at Chavín de Huántar, Peru.
The ACLS Fellowship Program is funded primarily by the ACLS endowment, which has benefited from the generous support of esteemed funders, institutional members, and individual donors since our founding in 1919.