$3.5 Million Awarded to 63 Scholars Recognizes Excellence in Humanities and Social Sciences Research

NEW YORK, April 16, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) is pleased to announce the 2026 ACLS Fellows. As ACLS celebrates 100 years of grantmaking in 2026, the ACLS Fellowship Program stands as its longest-running program, recognizing outstanding scholarship in the humanities and social sciences.

ACLS Fellowships provide up to $60,000 to support scholars for six to 12 months of full-time research and writing.

This year, the program will award more than $3.5 million to 63 scholars who are poised to make original and significant contributions to their field. The awardees were selected from a pool of over 2,000 applicants through a multi-stage peer review process and represent a broad range of institutions, fields, and career stages. Over half of the 2026 ACLS Fellows are early-career scholars and scholars who do not hold tenure-track faculty appointments.

ACLS Fellowships provide up to $60,000 to support scholars for six to 12 months of full-time research and writing. Awardees who are independent scholars, adjunct faculty, or have teaching-intensive roles receive an additional stipend between $3,000 and $6,000.

“We are proud to award ACLS Fellowships to 63 outstanding scholars across a range of fields,” said ACLS President Joy Connolly. “Deep understanding of humanity and human endeavor doesn’t come out of thin air: it rests on the work of generations of scholars who need time to do research and develop their arguments. We salute the new fellows’ contributions to knowledge and to society, and we celebrate their expertise and dedication.”

The 2026 fellows include scholars based at public and private research universities, liberal arts colleges, community colleges, and a museum. Their projects include a history of convicts on the galleys of the Spanish monarchy; a study of the conceptions of race in early Black intellectual thought; an investigation into the lives and works of Gaza’s poets and historians; a disability history of the post-Soviet transition; an examination of the relationship between Latin American fiction and Soviet literature; and a historical study of changing attitudes toward abortion in ancient Rome.

Meet the 2026 ACLS Fellows and learn about their projects.

The ACLS Fellowship Program is funded primarily by the ACLS endowment, which has benefited from the generous support of esteemed funders, institutional members, and individual donors since our founding in 1919.

Formed a century ago, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) is a nonprofit federation of 81 scholarly organizations. As the leading representative of American scholarship in the humanities and social sciences, ACLS upholds the core principle that knowledge is a public good. In supporting its member organizations, ACLS expands the forms, content, and flow of scholarly knowledge, reflecting our commitment to diversity of identity and experience. ACLS collaborates with institutions, associations, and individuals to strengthen the evolving infrastructure for scholarship.