Deadline: November 6, 2024
Applications are open for the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) HBCU Faculty Fellowships 2024-2025. Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) are a vital component of the higher education ecosystem with a distinguished record of teaching and research contributions to the academic humanities and interpretive social sciences.
This program supports the work of faculty at HBCUs by providing awards that attend to the specific teaching, research, and service contexts of their institutions. The program is the result of an extensive series of listening sessions and consultations with HBCU faculty and administrators from a wide range of institutions about opportunities and needs for research support at their colleges and universities.
Benefits
- Stipend: $30,000 to $50,000 fellowships to be used for semester or year-long research leaves, summer salary, or course releases, and any other activities that advance the proposed project, including (but not limited to) travel to collections or conferences, research and editorial support, and child- or eldercare costs.
- Each fellowship comes with an additional grant of $2,500 to the awardee’s home institution to support humanities programming or infrastructure.
- Applicants who advance to the finalist round of review will receive a $500 grant to support their research, in addition to access to project and proposal development workshops in 2025.
Eligibility
Applicants must:
- Be employed primarily as instructors at an institution designated as an Historically Black College or University. (consult this list to determine whether your institution is eligible.) Applicants do not need to be appointed full-time and do not need to be on the tenure-track. Part-time and adjunct instructors are welcome to apply. All awardees must remain employed at an accredited HBCU for the duration of the award term.
- Have an MA or PhD in the humanities or related social sciences that was conferred by the application deadline.
- Commit to research leave of at least four course releases (or their equivalent, such as a semester or two summer research leave), or more, over the course of the award term. ACLS encourages award recipients to work with their institutions to leverage the funds to support their research leaves to their fullest extent.
- Agree to take part in occasional networking, project development, and mentorship events during the course of the award term.
Projects must:
- Address a topic in the humanities or social sciences and/or teaching and learning in those disciplines in a higher education setting.
- Employ predominantly humanistic approaches and qualitative/interpretive methodologies.
- Incorporate original scholarly research, regardless of the final product.
- Incorporate in their project budgets, at minimum, four course releases (across the entire grant term), or two consecutive summers of research time, or a semester-length research leave. (ACLS provides a budget template for reference.)
Application
Applications must be submitted no later than 9:00 PM EST, November 6, 2024.
Applications must be submitted online and must include the components listed below. All uploads must have margins of one inch on all sides, formatted in Arial or Helvetica 11-point font. Applicant may use any standard citation style in their proposal narrative, although citations (footnotes or endnotes) are included in the page count. Applicants that do not adhere to stated formatting guidelines will be excluded from review.
- Completed application form (this includes basic biographical information, as well as short-answer questions describing your project, teaching and service responsibilities, and institutional context).
- A brief personal statement describing your journey as a scholar and how personal experience, scholarly influences, and broader research interests inform your proposed project (one page, double spaced).
- Proposal detailing project context and goals, work already undertaken, and resources needed to complete project (no more than five pages, double spaced, including any footnotes or endnotes, and any images).
- A bibliography of up to two pages (single spaced, with separate sections detailing primary sources – if applicable – and secondary literature).
- A one-page workplan detailing work to be conducted during award tenure.
- A basic budget. (ACLS provides a sample template for reference.)
For more information, visit ACLS HBCU Faculty Fellowships.
