The American Council of Learned Societies Opens Second Round of Leading Edge Fellowship Competition for Recent PhDs in Religion, Ethics, and Related Fields
Program Partners Early Career Humanities Scholars
with Nonprofit Organizations Advancing Social Justice
and Broader Understanding of the COVID-19 Pandemic
The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) announces the second competition of the Leading Edge Fellowship, made possible by the generous support of the Henry Luce Foundation.
The Leading Edge Program provides one-year fellowships to recent humanities PhDs as they pursue publicly engaged projects that document the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on communities and advance collective understanding of the conditions that helped worsen that impact, such as inequality, increasing precarity, divisive media, and racism.
In this second phase of the program, ACLS will place 11 scholars of religion, theology, ethics, and related humanities fields with participating nonprofit organizations across the country including the Smithsonian National Museum of American History (Washington, DC), Southern Coalition for Social Justice (Durham, NC), Freedom for Immigrants (Oakland, CA), and the American Friends Service Committee (Newark, NJ). The full roster of partnering organizations and projects is available here.
ACLS is now accepting fellowship applications for this cycle of the program, with applications due by 9pm EST on Monday, November 2, 2020.
Each Leading Edge Fellow will receive a $60,000 stipend, health insurance, and professional development funding. Fellows will lead substantive, community-engaged projects for their host organizations on issues of criminal justice reform and mass incarceration, economic inequality, vaccines and public health, and immigration. The fellows also will participate in a variety of professional development and networking activities designed to help translate the experiences of their 12-month placements into future work in the academy and beyond.
The Henry Luce Foundation seeks to enrich public discourse by promoting innovative scholarship, cultivating new leaders, and fostering international understanding. Established in 1936 by Henry R. Luce, the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Time, Inc., the Luce Foundation advances its mission through grantmaking and leadership programs in the fields of Asia, higher education, religion and theology, art, and public policy.
Formed in 1919, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) is a nonprofit federation of 75 scholarly organizations. As the preeminent representative of American scholarship in the humanities and related social sciences, ACLS holds a core belief that knowledge is a public good. As such, ACLS strives to promote the circulation of humanistic knowledge throughout society. In addition to stewarding and representing its member organizations, ACLS employs its $140 million endowment and $35 million annual operating budget to support scholarship in the humanities and social sciences and to advocate for the centrality of the humanities in the modern world.
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