The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) has provided grants and fellowships for academic study since 1919. 1 A federation of 81 scholarly societies, 2 ALCS makes grants to support critical theory and left-of-center study in academia. 34
The ACLS currently supports progressive academics through research in Sociology, Cultural Studies, Gender Studies, and LGBTQ Studies. 4 Money is also given to the American Civil Liberties Union, Community Partners, and the United Negro College Fund. 5 ACLS also often provide grants to the schools at which its board members teach. 5
Founding and Early History
The American Council of Learned Societies started with 11 academic societies creating a federation dedicated to supporting academic research in the humanities. 6 After 70 years, the federation had grown to 43 constituent member societies; however, in the following 40 years, the federation nearly doubled amazing a total 75 societies. 6 As of 2024, ACLS claimed 81 member societies. 2
The ACLS has supported identity-related studies in academia, inducting the Association of Asian Studies in 1954, the Hispanic Society of America in 1973, and other cultural studies organizations early in the federation’s history. 6
The federation also released publications throughout its existence encouraging academic community. The Dictionary of American Biography released in 1946 provided every biography published that year, and the British Manuscripts project of 1955 provided the contents of over 5 million pages of microfilm manuscripts in the databases of England and Wales. 7
Grants and Finances
The American Council of Learned Societies manages an endowment of over $140 million and has an annual operating budget around $35 million. 4 Most of this money is funded by private donations, including from philanthropic institutions like the Mellon Foundation. 8
The leadership of the ACLS as of 2021 represented multiple universities, such as Rutgers (secretary Ann Fabian), Harvard University (chair William Kirby, and member Michelle Lamont), and Amherst College (vice chair Nicola M. Courtright). 9 The schools represented in ACLS leadership also were large recipients of grant funding with Rutgers University receiving the third-largest amount of money in 2019 at $518,000, Harvard receiving nearly $200,000, and Amherst College receiving the fifth-most money in 2019 at $265,000. 10
In 2019, the ACLS gave over $150,000 to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), another $150,000 to the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice, and over $300,000 to Los Angeles’ Community Partners. 11
ACLS supports the work of left-of-center academics. The Rutgers University grants supported post-doctoral work for three faculty: Evelyn Autry, who taught the course “Feminist Genealogies: Decolonial Thinking and Indigenous Feminisms” which focused on “Contextualizing recent feminist/queer turns towards decoloniality in the Americas”; Naomi Extra, who researched “Sex-positive Black Feminism… concerning the themes of pleasure and agency in the lives of Black women and girls”; and Amir Moosavi, an English professor who researched Arabic and Persian Literature after the Iran-Iraq conflict. 3
For comparison, in 2015 over $620,000 went to the University of Chicago supporting objective academic research, funding projects in music tonality throughout western culture, archaeology in Egypt focused on Ancient Egypt’s New Kingdom, and a book length study of epistemology and knowledge creation during the Enlightenment. 12
In 2021, 25 recipients of ACLS’s Frederick Burkhardt Fellowships each received $100,000 to support their work. These fellowships supported more left-of-center, critical-theory-based academic research discussing things such as racial inequality in the history of private insurance, sexuality in India’s caste system, and how practices in minstrelsy impacted the American cinema. 4
Grants are also awarded for academic study overseas. In 2019 over $1 million supported academic study in sub-Saharan Africa, mostly supporting academic research in Ghana. ACLS also spent over $800,000 on studies in Europe and nearly $200,000 in East Asia. 13
Much of the funding for the ACLS comes from the Mellon Foundation which gave nearly $15 million to support academic research through the ACLS. This came through the Mellon Foundation’s Digital Justice Program designed to support study of how racial inequality is promulgated through technology, the Mellon Leading Edge Fellowship supporting budding academics in their post-Doctoral research, and the MMUF Administration and Annual Institutional Renewals providing financial support to academic institutions distributed among faculty. 8
To support one annual cycle of program renewals at institutions hosting the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship: Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Duke, Emory, Harvard, Heritage, Northwestern, Princeton, Rice, Stanford, Wesleyan, and Yale Universities; Barnard, Bowdoin, Brooklyn, Bryn Mawr, Carleton, Connecticut, Dartmouth, Grinnell, Haverford, Hunter, Macalester, Oberlin, Pomona, Queens, Smith, Swarthmore, Wellesley, Whittier, and Williams Colleges; the Universities of California at Berkeley, at Los Angeles, and at Riverside; the Universities of Cape Town, Chicago, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Puerto Rico at Río Piedras, Southern California, Texas at Austin, the Western Cape, and the Witwatersrand; California Institute of Technology; City College of New York; United Negro College Fund, Inc.; and Washington University in St. Louis
To support one annual cycle of program renewals at institutions hosting the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship: Barnard, Bowdoin, Brooklyn, Bryn Mawr, Carleton, Connecticut, Dartmouth, Grinnell, Haverford, Hunter, Macalester, Oberlin, Pomona, Queens, Smith, Swarthmore, Wellesley, Whittier, and Williams Colleges; Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Duke, Emory, Harvard, Heritage, Northwestern, Princeton, Rice, Stanford, Wesleyan, and Yale Universities; the Universities of California at Berkeley, at Los Angeles, and at Riverside; the Universities of Cape Town, Chicago, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Puerto Rico at Rio Piedras, Southern California, Texas at Austin, the Western Cape, and the Witwatersrand; the California Institute of Technology; California State University Foundation; City College of New York; United Negro College Fund, Inc.; And Washington University in ST. Louis
To support Mellon Leading Edge Fellowships, enabling recent humanities PHDS to partner with nonprofit and government organizations active in the work of social justice and racial equity
To continue support for dissertation completion fellowships for graduate students in specifically designated fields of the humanities and social sciences
To support the continuation of the Society and Scholars fellowship program, enabling faculty at research universities to connect humanities scholarship with the public interest
To support an open competition addressing sustainable digital infrastructures for understudied and marginalized collections, archives, and recently discovered primary sources
6. American Council of Learned Societies “Directory of Constituent Societies of the American Council of Learned Societies.” Private publication, 1980. Accessed digitally via Richard H. Heindel Library (Middletown, Pennsylvania) on 12 December 2021. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=pst.000064037929&view=1up&seq=3&skin=2021
