2019 Annual Meeting

The 2019 ACLS Annual Meeting was held on April 26 at the New York Marriott Downtown. In addition to the annual Meeting of the Council and other business, this event was also part of the ACLS Centennial Celebration, a year-long commemoration of the work and impact of ACLS over a century of service.

President Pauline Yu’s address to the Council began with a report on the $25 million in fellowships that ACLS awarded in 2019. She also spoke about the Scholars and Society program; her expression of gratitude to the Carnegie Corporation for a $5 million Centennial grant in support of the African Humanities Program; a review of the collective discussions of the executive directors of the societies over the past year (including a day-long discussion of sexual harassment policies); a discussion of the work of the Luce Foundation program that brings together scholars of religion and journalists; a revision of the Mellon-funded post-doc fellows program that is supporting institutions that seek to use post-docs as a way of diversifying the faculty in particular departments.  Finally, President Yu discussed the reasons for and progress of the newly announced Centennial Campaign.  She thanked the Council for close collaboration over her 16 years as ACLS’s president.

Pauline also introduced president-elect Joy Connolly, who assumed the ACLS presidency on July 1, 2019. They discussed Joy’s path to ACLS, Joy’s work at two different universities in New York – NYU and the CUNY Graduate Center, Joy’s participation in a convening held at ACLS that led to the new Scholars and Society program, and her involvement in the Society for Classical Studies.

Other sessions included:

• Emerging Themes and Methods of Humanities Research
• The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation: Fifty Years of Scholarly Communication
• 2019 Charles Homer Haskins Prize Lecture by Lynn Hunt