ACLS Celebrates 2025 Books Releases by Fellows

As the year wraps up, ACLS is pleased to share a select list of books released in 2025 by ACLS awardees, many of which developed from ACLS-supported research. These publications offer just a glimpse of the distinguished work produced by ACLS fellows and grantees, showcasing the incredible breadth of humanistic scholarship, from the political economy of archaeology in Mexico, to new histories of artists central to the American Revolution, to an ethnographic study of Vietnamese Buddhism.

• The Painter’s Fire: A Forgotten History of the Artists Who Championed the American Revolution by Zara Anishanslin, 2006 Luce/ACLS Dissertation Fellow in American Art and 2021 Mellon/ACLS Scholars and Society Fellow (Harvard University Press)
• Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City by Bench Ansfield, 2020 Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellow and 2022 ACLS Fellow (W.W. Norton)
• Virtual Territories: Technology, Representation, and the State in a Digital Age by Jordan Branch, 2020 ACLS Fellow (Oxford University Press)
• Local Color: Reckoning with Blackness in the Port City of Veracruz by Karma F. Frierson, 2023 ACLS Fellow (University of California Press)
• In the Shadow of El Tajín: The Political Economy of Archaeology in Modern Mexico by Samuel Holley-Kline, 2023 ACLS Fellow (University of Nebraska Press)
• The Invention of Infinite Growth: How Economists Came to Believe a Dangerous Delusion by Christopher F. Jones, 2017 ACLS Fellow (The University of Chicago Press)
• A Wide Net of Solidarity: Antiracism and Anti-Imperialism from the Americas to the Globe by Anne Garland Mahler, 2020 ACLS Fellow (Duke University Press)
• Migration and Diaspora Identity in Northern Nigeria and Ghana, 1900–1970 by Rasheed Oyewole Olaniyi, 2011 African Humanities Program Postdoctoral Fellow (Boydell & Brewer)
• Mississippi Law: Policing and Reform in America’s Jim Crow Countryside by Justin Randolph, 2022 ACLS Fellow (The University of North Carolina Press)
• Near Light We Shine: Buddhist Charity in Urban Vietnam by Sara Ann Swenson, 2017 Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Dissertation Fellow in Buddhist Studies and 2023 ACLS Fellow (Oxford University Press)
• Buddhist Hermits in Eastern Tibet: Saint-Making and Ascetic Performance by Magdalena Maria Turek, 2020 Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Research Fellow in Buddhist Studies (Routledge)
• Black Excellence: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Black Liberalism by Danielle Wiggins, 2022 ACLS Fellow (University of Pennsylvania Press)

ACLS Scholars in Action

All Recent Awardees

Elevating the Voices of Black Womxn and Girls

Leading Edge Fellow Amber Reid F’23 uses her humanities PhD as a research analyst at the Afiya Center in Dallas, TX.

Innovating Dissertation Methods

2023 Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellows share their pathbreaking research methods and fellowship experiences.

Researching in Buddhist Studies

Jue Liang F’23, F’19, G’16 shares her research exploring the intersection of gender and Tibetan Buddhism.

Supporting Scholars at HBCUs

Trushna Parekh F’24, Lamon B. Lawhorn G’24, and Ana Lucia Araujo F’24 share their research and the impact of the ACLS HBCU Faculty Fellowship and Grant Program.