ACLS News

Leaders of National Humanities Fellowship-granting Organizations Meet at ACLS

On December 12, 2011, ACLS hosted the third annual gathering of leaders of agencies granting research fellowships to scholars in the humanities through national peer-reviewed competitions. Participants exchanged data on trends in numbers of applications received, the size of fellowship stipends awarded, protocols for peer-review, and new subjects and methods of research. Those attending affirmed that research fellowships represent a demonstrably efficient means of advancing scholarship in the humanities, especially as they give individual scholars the opportunity to set the intellectual agenda for their fields. The fact that the demand for the fellowships offered by these organizations dramatically exceeds the supply of excellent proposals submitted is evidence of both the energy in humanities scholarship today and the degree to which the national humanities research enterprise is underfunded.

Those pictured are (from left to right): Steve Wheatley, vice president, ACLS; Pauline Yu, president, ACLS; Geoffrey Harpham, president and director, National Humanities Center; Lizabeth Cohen, interim dean, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study; Mary Patterson McPherson, executive officer, American Philosophical Society; Jean Strouse, director, Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, New York Public Library; Carole Watson, deputy chairman, National Endowment for the Humanities; Philip E. Lewis, vice president, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; André Bernard, vice president and secretary, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation; Nicole Stahlmann, director of fellowship programs, ACLS; Peter Goddard, director, Institute for Advanced Study.