The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) is pleased to announce the 2021 Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellows.
These fellowships support promising doctoral students in the humanities and interpretive social sciences with a year of funding designed to help them complete projects that will form the foundations of their scholarly careers. The program, now in its fifteenth year, is made possible by a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
ACLS has named 72 fellows this year, the largest and most diverse cohort in the program’s history, selected through a multi-stage peer review process from a pool of over 1,000 applicants. Each fellow receives an award of $43,000 to support the final year of dissertation research and writing. In addition, fellows participate in a career development seminar to help them prepare for postdoctoral opportunities within and beyond the academy.
The projects pursued by the 2021 fellowship cohort represent a wide array of research topics, including the globalized ecosystem of white supremacist movements, the decolonizing role of bearing witness in Palestinian film and art, the multi-faceted activism of Black women educators in the mid-twentieth century, and Quechua theatre’s cross-cultural signification in eighteenth-century colonial Cuzco.
“ACLS is proud to support this exceptional cohort of emerging scholars, one third of whom identify as first-generation college students and two thirds of whom identify as scholars of color, as they pursue important new directions in humanistic scholarship,” said ACLS President Joy Connolly. “During a time of increased need for early-career scholars, this program allows us to invest in the future of the humanities, thanks to the continued commitment of the Mellon Foundation.”
Doctoral Candidate, English, Duke University
Vegetal Forms: How Plants Cultivate Life in Literature and Science
“Vegetal Forms” unearths how plants cultivate cosmologies: the storied and material histories people tell to make sense of the world. Beginning with microscopy in the early nineteenth century and ending with geoengineering in the twenty-first, the project advances an alternative history of modern science in which plants are central to biological configurations of life and the human. Plant animacy—how alive, intelligent or active plants are understood to be—underwrites political discourses of who acts and who is acted upon and, ultimately, who can claim the category of humanity. From Charles Darwin’s “Insectivorous Plants” (1875) to Wanuri Kahiu’s “Pumzi” (2009), narratives of plants operate in systems of cultivation—plantations, greenhouses, gardens, and laboratories—to naturalize, or cultivate, the rights of living beings. Drawing upon a cultural studies methodology, “Vegetal Forms” relies upon uncanny plants to defamiliarize deep-rooted assumptions about what it means to be alive and to be human.
English Department
