FAQ: Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship

Yes, an applicant to this fellowship may also apply to as many fellowship programs as are suitable. However, not more than one ACLS or ACLS-joint award may normally be accepted in any one competition year.

No, eligibility for this program is not restricted based on citizenship or permanent residency. Any doctoral student who is pursuing a PhD in the humanities or social sciences at degree-granting institutions in the United States is eligible to apply.

Yes, but unsuccessful applicants may reapply to this program only once.

The eligibility criteria are designed to support doctoral students who are at the earliest stages of dissertation project design, so that they can undertake exploratory, experimental, expansive research. (In other words, scholars who will be immediately pre-candidacy or who have recently become doctoral candidates/ABD at the time of the award.)

In order to be eligible for this fellowship in the 2026-27 competition year, you must have not advanced to PhD candidacy/ABD status prior to January 1, 2026, and you must intend to complete your dissertation after May 31, 2029. It is essential that you indicate your expected ABD date in the application, and your expected date of earning the PhD. This will help ACLS program staff determine your eligibility. ACLS also provides space within the application where you can describe any disruptions to your progress that would affect the timeline to degree. If you have any questions about your eligibility, please contact ACLS program staff at [email protected].

Possibly. The answer to this question depends on other factors in your progress to degree, such as a leave of absence from your program for family or medical leave, or a “resetting” of your timeline due to a formal move from one PhD program/department to another. Please fill in all requested fields in the education section of the application and use the space allotted to describe any special circumstances that have affected your progress to degree. As a reminder, ACLS is seeking to support scholars who are at the earliest stages of dissertation project design. The program is not designed to support graduate students whose dissertation research and/or writing is well underway or advanced.

Yes, as long as you advanced to ABD status no earlier than January 1, 2026.

ACLS requires that prospective awardees be able to take up a full year (9-12 months) of sustained specialized research and training, released from normal coursework, assistantships, and teaching responsibilities. Fellowship funds may not be captured by fellows’ home institution for the payment of fees or tuition. Please direct the director of graduate studies, department chair, or dean who will be completing your institutional statement form to write to [email protected] with any questions about this requirement. (It is likely your institution has managed such requirements related to an ACLS fellowship or grant in the past, and we can provide that information to them.) In any case, we encourage you to submit your application by the deadline, even if these issues are still being sorted out between ACLS and your institution; we want to make it possible for graduate students from across US higher education to take advantage of this fellowship opportunity.

ACLS requires that prospective awardees be able to take up a full year (9-12 months) of sustained specialized research and training, released from normal coursework, assistantships, and teaching responsibilities. Fellows must remain fully enrolled during the fellowship term in order to maintain access to institutional resources and benefits, such as health insurance. Institutions are expected to reinstate the student’s full funding package upon return, not a reduced package. The fellowship stipend may not be used for tuition or fees, a condition established in consultation with our funding partner. We recognize that institutions manage enrollment status and funding packages in different ways. If you are a university representative with questions about this requirement, please email [email protected].

We do not require that your institution provide guaranteed funding during your PhD program. We determine eligibility based on a variety of other factors, regardless of funding status.

No, you may work on it in multiple sessions, though you will need to save your work after you finish each section of the application. Once you have submitted the application, you cannot make changes.

No, your application will be judged as it is at the time of submission.

Notifications and other correspondence are sent via email from “acls.org” addresses. In order to prevent ACLS emails from being blocked, we suggest that applicants and letter writers:

1. Add the relevant ACLS email addresses (e.g., [email protected], [email protected], and [email protected] for letter writers) to their address book or safe senders list.
2. Check spam or junk mail folder for notifications and correspondence if you are expecting them.
3. In the event that you continue not to receive ACLS emails in either your inbox or spam/junk folder, it may be that your institution (“.edu”) or internet service provider (“.com” or “.net” email) is blocking these emails before they reach you. Please contact the appropriate personnel, e.g., your IT department, so that they may resolve the issue.

In your application timeline you should include the permit(s) required for the proposed project and the estimated date(s) by which you expect to secure them. Your knowledge of the required permits will help demonstrate your awareness of the ethical and social context of your research. Reviewers will use this information to evaluate whether your project is feasible and whether you are prepared to begin conducting research. Depending on the research context, examples of permits include research visas, approvals or exemptions from institutional review boards and other ethics committees, human subject approvals, animal care and use approvals, government clearances, excavation permits, letters of affiliation, and permissions from the local scientific, academic, museum, institutional, or tribal authorities who oversee your research area. Please do not contact ACLS to ask which permits you need; instead, consult with your contacts and/or advisors.

Yes, you may request feedback via an online form. The link to this form will be provided when you are notified of the results of the competition. All requests for comments from the 2026-27 competition must be received by June 30, 2027. Due to the number of requests ACLS receives each year, and the work of administering new fellowships each spring, we do not begin processing feedback until the summer, after the competition year is complete. Thank you for your patience.

Please also note that feedback is made available at the discretion of each reviewer. Comments may not be available from every reviewer who assessed your application. We encourage peer reviewers to provide constructive feedback to applicants looking to improve on their ideas or how they express those ideas; comments are not an explanation or rationale for why an application was not selected for an award. Such feedback also is not intended to be directions that, if followed, would lead necessarily to greater success in future competitions. After all, the pool of reviewers changes every year, as does the pool of applications.

The work sample should demonstrate your ability to conduct original research and communicate your ideas effectively within and outside your discipline. The work sample should represent your strongest relevant work. Applicants may submit an excerpt from a larger work, such as a dissertation chapter, manuscript, or other academic writing. Applicants should consult with advisors when selecting a writing sample that best represents their scholarly abilities and supports their application.

Please note that any citation or bibliography included in the work sample count toward the page limit (no more than fifteen pages total).

Yes, although it must meet our formatting requirements: No more than fifteen pages total, double spaced, with one-inch margins, including any images and footnotes or endnotes, in Arial or Helvetica 11-point font. Applicants may use any standard citation style in their work sample, although citations – footnotes or endnotes – are included in the page count for the document. While text in the body of the work sample must be double spaced and in 11-point Arial or Helvetica font, footnotes may be in 10-point font and single spaced. Excerpts from publications that do not meet the formatting guidelines will not be accepted. An application containing a work sample that does not conform to stated length and formatting requirements will be deemed ineligible for the competition.

Your work sample’s status (published or unpublished) has no bearing on your success in the competition.

Yes, your work sample can be a co-authored paper, but please allocate some space at the beginning of the sample to describe your role in the project and in authoring the paper.

The personal statement is a brief narrative (no more than two pages, double spaced, in Arial or Helvetica 11-point font) describing your journey as a scholar and how your work comes together at the nexus of personal experience, research interests, and desire to shift the forms and formats of academic research.

The goal of this statement is to help our peer reviewers understand the connection between the scholar and their project. Applicants may choose to describe motivations for pursuing a particular topic of study or methodology, or how teaching and working conditions have shaped their approach to research, or other experiences that illuminate their scholarly trajectory. Please note that ACLS offers space elsewhere in the application to address delays in progress or other circumstances affecting time to degree.

Applicants may use any standard citation style, provided it is used consistently within each component of the application (proposal and work sample). There is no preference for a particular style. Applicants should select the format that best supports the readability of their work.

Yes. Applicants must use this template.

Working with an external mentor is a key aspect of the fellowship. We expect fellows to engage a mentor who will offer critical advice and perspectives on their plans for knowledge creation and circulation. In the interest of building out a fellow’s network, the external mentor must stand outside of current advising relationships within your program or department. ACLS asks that mentors be designated by the start of the fellowship term and will assist with connecting fellow and mentor as needed.

No, applicants are not required to have selected an external mentor at the time of application. If you have already identified a mentor, you are encouraged to explain why you selected that individual and how you have worked or will work together. If you have not yet identified a mentor, describe the qualities and expertise you will seek in a mentor. Fellows must designate an external mentor at the start of the fellowship term.

External mentors may come from a wide range of backgrounds and are not required to be scholars in the humanities or social sciences. Mentors may be based in another division of your university, at another academic institution, or outside the academy. Mentors may be located anywhere in the world. Applicants may propose more than one external mentor, though we recommend limiting the external mentorship team to no more than two individuals. If multiple mentors are designated, the $2,000 mentor stipend will be divided among them.

Applicants should identify mentors whose knowledge and resources will help advance the proposed project. The external mentor should not be a member of your dissertation committee. Instead, external mentors should complement an applicant’s existing circle of advisors by filling gaps in expertise, perspective, connections or support.

Appropriate expenses for the research and travel funds include, but are not limited to, travel for research purposes (transportation, accommodations, food, etc.); research materials or equipment needed to complete your project (computers, printers, cameras, etc.); and honoraria for research participants.

Professional development funds may be used to support skills acquisition, training, or additional research expenses to support innovative/expansive directions. This may include travel, tuition, and fees for conferences, courses, workshops, and trainings related to your project; reimbursement for external consultants; and scholarly society membership fees.

ORCID offers a persistent digital identifier (an ORCID iD) that you as an individual scholar own and control, and that distinguishes you from every other researcher. ORCID is being implemented by publishers around the world. In some countries with centralized funding structures, ORCID is in even greater use than it is in the United States. Ten million researchers have created their own ORCIDs.

Learn more about ORCID at https://orcid.org/.

ACLS is joining higher education organizations and funders in encouraging the use of ORCID, which will strengthen academic infrastructure and our relationships with constituencies throughout the academic world.

The benefits for scholars are numerous: having a persistent ID for applicants and fellows could be helpful to scholars whose scholarly record is attributed differently over time (due to differences between Roman and non-Roman characters or because a scholar’s name changes as a result of marriage, divorce, or transitions in gender identification). Faculty with adjunct or other contract employment also benefit from having a persistent and non-institutionally based identity, since institutions do not follow any standard record-keeping on their public websites.

In future years, we hope to integrate more of an applicant’s ORCID record data into the application process, saving them time and effort. For now, we believe that simply encouraging ORCID registration is a great first step.

https://orcid.org/

While it only takes a minute to sign up for an account, we advise applicants for ACLS fellowships and grants to register with ORCID before beginning their online applications.

No, not for the purposes of the current ACLS fellowship and grant competitions. You should control your ORCID privacy settings in the way that makes you most comfortable. You can review ORCID’s full privacy policy at https://info.orcid.org/privacy-policy/.

How much information you add to your profile is entirely up to you. You can learn more about the benefits of having and using an ORCID profile at https://info.orcid.org/benefits-for-researchers/.