This fall, UC Berkeley will hire three new professors and offer eight new fellowships to graduate students with funding from the American Council of Learned Societies.
Fellowships, including those offered by ACLS, play an important role in supporting research in the humanities by easing the financial burden of hiring new professors for institutions such as UC Berkeley. The grants cover a significant part of the new professors’ salaries, freeing up the university’s resources.
The ACLS New Faculty Fellows program grants $50,000 to those with recent doctorates in the humanities and pairs those individuals with institutions that share their research interests.
Deirdre Loughridge, a New Faculty Fellow recipient through the campus’s music department, stressed that outside funding from organizations like ACLS is crucial to scholarship in the humanities. Without it, many scholars would not be able to continue their research.
“Humanistic inquiry is often seen as less ‘useful’ than science or engineering, but thinking critically is essential to leading a full and responsible life,” Loughridge said.
Besides helping soon-to-be faculty, ACLS also helps current professors take time off of teaching in order to spend time researching, covering their costs for one year through the ACLS fellowship.
Joanna Picciotto, a recent ACLS fellow, is an associate professor in the campus English department who is researching the ecological discourse that developed in literature in the late 17th century.
She said that even though the 17th century is not often associated with ecological thinking, she hopes that her research will shed some light on how we speak about ecological disasters today. Picciotto said she was excited to have ACLS funding.
“It’s a year’s worth of funding, so I won’t have to teach, and I can focus on my research,” Picciotto said.
The ACLS also provides funding to graduate students through the Dissertation Completion Fellowship during the final year of their dissertations so that they can focus on research rather than teaching.
Eight graduate students in Berkeley received this fellowship, which is awarded to students in the humanities and social sciences. Without this fellowship, many graduate students would have to split their time between teaching and research in their final year.
“The possibility of receiving outside funds is good for me because I’d be a GSI without it, but now I can actually focus on my research,” said Abigail Andrews, a sociology doctoral candidate and a Dissertation Completion Fellowship recipient.
The ACLS supports the humanities as well as young scholars pursuing widely diverse research in fields of study that are not traditionally well funded, according to Picciotto.
According to the ACLS website, the New Faculty Fellowship aims to address the problem faced by recent graduates in the humanities and related fields when facing an increasingly “jobless market.”
Contact Jose Hernandez at [email protected]