The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) is pleased to announce the 2025 awardees of the ACLS HBCU Faculty Fellowship and Grant Program, which supports exceptional research by faculty in the humanities and interpretive social sciences at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). This year’s 20 awardees come from 11 HBCUs and represent a range of scholarly approaches to humanistic research, community engaged work, and pedagogical innovation.
Eight fellows will receive up to $50,000 each to support long-term engagement with a research project. Twelve grantees will receive $10,000 each to support early-stage project development and small-scale research-grounded projects. Both awards are designed to offer flexible support that attends to the research, teaching, and service conditions of HBCU faculty. Additionally, awardees will have access to networking and scholarly programming responsive to their academic goals and disciplinary and institutional contexts.
“ACLS is proud to support this vibrant group of scholars and celebrate their important contributions to the humanities and interpretive social sciences,” said Nike Nivar Ortiz, ACLS Program Officer in US Programs. “ACLS HBCU Faculty Fellows and Grantees exemplify the wealth of scholarship found across HBCU campuses, which is keenly attentive to underrepresented histories and voices, as well as timely social issues that intersect with their campus communities.”
This year’s awarded projects cover a wide range of disciplines in the humanities and interpretive social sciences, including African American studies, history, philosophy, political science, theater studies, and women’s studies. The research topics encompass regional, national, and transnational contexts, including research on the New Orleans Black Press, the anti-apartheid movement in Florida, and exploring historical connections between HBCUs and African universities. Many projects also tackle pressing social issues such as examining racial bias and its impact on Black maternal health and exploring American democratic backsliding since the 1960s.
Learn more about the 2025 ACLS HBCU Faculty Fellows and ACLS HBCU Faculty Grantees and their projects.
ACLS developed the HBCU Faculty Fellowship and Grant Program in consultation with faculty and academic leaders across dozens of HBCUs through in-person and virtual focus groups as well as a series of faculty workshops. The awards come with an additional grant of $2,500 to the awardee’s home institution to support humanities programming or infrastructure. In addition, applicants who advanced to the finalist round of review will receive a $500 grant to support their research agendas and will be invited to virtual research and proposal development workshops taking place this summer.
The ACLS HBCU Faculty Fellowship and Grant 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 interpretive 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.
