Donor Spotlight: Professor Bruce Grant

Professor Bruce Grant was awarded his first ACLS fellowship in 2000. As a Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellow at the National Humanities Center, he was able to take a year away from his duties as an Associate Professor at Swarthmore College for research. That time for study resulted in his acclaimed book on the making of the Caucasus in the Russian popular imagination, The Captive and the Gift: Cultural Histories of Sovereignty in Russia and the Caucasus (Cornell 2009), a major milestone in his early career as an expert on cultural politics in the former Soviet Union.

Nearly two decades later, as a tenured professor at New York University, he became a 2016 ACLS Fellowship recipient, which enabled him to take his scholarship in new directions and work on a new book of histories of Muslim satire and the undoing of authoritarian logics in contemporary Azerbaijan.

Today, as Chair of Anthropology at New York University, he credits both ACLS awards for “remaking” him as a scholar, which is what inspired him to become a monthly donor.

“Modest as my contributions might be, I became a monthly donor to ACLS so that someone else gets to ask the same questions that meant so much to me twenty years back,” he said.

We at ACLS are grateful for donors like Bruce who so generously support us each month.

Learn more about ways to support the work and mission of ACLS.