The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) is pleased to announce three new partnerships that reflect our commitment to supporting institutional efforts to increase the diversity of college and university faculty. Through the Postdoctoral Partnership Initiative, The City College of New York, Haverford College, and Temple University will each offer a two-year postdoctoral fellowship for promising early career scholars from historically underrepresented groups such as black/African American, American Indian, Alaskan Native, and Hispanic/Latino scholars. The institutions will appoint these fellows with the intent to promote them to Assistant Professors in tenure track positions at the end of the fellowship period. Support for ACLS’s Postdoctoral Partnership Initiative is made possible by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
“These three new partnerships each, in their own way, exemplify the innovative, high-quality postdoctoral opportunities that this program was designed to foster,” said ACLS program officer Valerie Popp. “Some plan to target a specific field that the faculty and institution see as a promising environment for more diverse voices, while others hope to create new pathways and processes for hiring faculty across campus. Alongside ACLS, our partners seek to help foster a more broadly representative generation of humanities faculty by recruiting historically underrepresented scholars as postdocs to propel their transition into the professoriate. These experiences also stand to enrich our ongoing conversation about the evolution of the humanities professoriate and the possibilities for programs like these to be transformative for scholars and institutions alike.”
These partnerships are the result of an open call for proposals ACLS issued in fall 2018 and represent an evolution of an initiative to learn more about the role of postdoctoral fellowships in the humanities and their impact on the scholars who held them. For each partnership, ACLS will cover the cost of one two-year postdoctoral fellowship with a competitive annual stipend and benefits to be hosted within a department or center at the institution. The call for proposals continues with a rolling deadline. ACLS looks forward to partnering with additional institutions that envision working intensively with individual departments that are committed to building a faculty body more representative of the diversity of our students and today’s curricular needs in their respective areas and in higher education, overall.
For more information, see the program description or contact fellowships@acls.org.
The American Council of Learned Societies, a private, nonprofit federation of 75 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 $25 million to over 350 scholars across a variety of humanistic disciplines.