The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) is pleased to announce 15 new awardees for its Project Development Grants program.

This ACLS funding initiative, now in its fifth year, offers grants in aid to faculty at teaching-intensive colleges and universities whose research projects are poised to make important advancements in the humanities and the interpretive social sciences.

“Project Development Grants recognize the vital contributions to scholarship by faculty across the country with limited opportunities to take time away from the classroom for research and writing,” said ACLS President Joy Connolly. “We are proud to support these exceptional scholars as they pursue innovative research projects.”

Projects awarded grants for the 2022-23 academic year represent a wide range of areas of study, spanning Buddhist epic poetry to the modern architecture of Sao Paolo to the social and cultural dimensions of Mambo in New York City. This year’s awardees are:

  • Felicia Bevel, Assistant Professor, History, University of North Florida. Exporting Dixie: Race, Nation, and Nostalgia in the Age of Empire
  • Nathan Braccio, Postdoctoral Fellow, History, Utah State University. Mapping New England: The Algonquian-English Cartographic Struggle, 1500-1700
  • Andrew Britt, Assistant Professor, Liberal Arts, University of North Carolina School of the Arts. The Paradoxes of Ethnoracial Space in São Paulo, 1930s-1980s
  • Carmela Dormani, Assistant Professor, Sociology and Behavioral Sciences, Mercy College. The Many Lives of Mambo: Culture and Consumption in New York’s Salsa Dance Scene
  • Rachel Fabian, Visiting Assistant Professor, Film and Media Studies, State University of New York, College at Purchase. Emergent Transnationalisms and 1970s–80s Feminist Collective Media Making
  • Vani Kannan, Assistant Professor, English, City University of New York, Lehman College. Writing Mutiny: Rhetoric, Transnationalism, and Asian Coalitional Organizing in the United States
  • Rebecca Kumar, Assistant Professor, English, Spelman College. Brown Looks
  • Natasha Mikles, Assistant Professor, Philosophy and Religious Studies, Texas State University. Buddhist, not Buddhicized: The Gesar Epic as Lived Narrative
  • Anna Muenchrath, Visiting Assistant Professor, English, Appalachian State University. Actors, Institutions, and Networks: Recovering Agency in Global Literary Circulation in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries
  • Ameera Nimjee, Assistant Professor, Music and Asian Studies, University of Puget Sound. Racializing Creativity in South Asian American Dance
  • Rachel Norman, Assistant Professor, English, Linfield University. The Body that Speaks: Language in Contemporary Arab American Literature
  • Samiha Rahman, Assistant Professor, Human Development, California State University, Long Beach. Learning Black Muslim Excellence: Islamic Education and Diasporic Exchange
  • Marcio Siwi, Assistant Professor, History, Towson University. Making the Modern and Cultured City: Art, Architecture, and Urbanism in Post-WWII São Paulo
  • Wendy Tronrud, Bard Prison Initiative. “Odd Secrets of the Line”: Emily Dickinson, Black Song, and the Uses of Folk
  • Isaac Wiegman, Lecturer, Philosophy, Texas State University. Prime Movers: A Theory of the Primitive Passions

Learn more about the 2022 ACLS Project Development grantees and their projects.

Each grantee receives $5,000 which may be applied to any costs that will support their project, including travel; research assistance; course buyout or summer salary; and other research- or project-related expenses.

Project Development Grants are competitive and awarded as a component of the ACLS Fellowship program. The program is funded by the ACLS endowment, to which many individuals and institutions have contributed, including the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Arcadia Charitable Trust, the ACLS Research University Consortium and college and university Associates, former fellows, and individuals and friends.