Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship 2025-2026 ($42,000 stipend) – YOA

Deadline: October 29, 2025

Applications are open for the Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship 2025-2026. ACLS invites purposes for Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowships, which give a yr of assist for doctoral college students getting ready to embark on modern dissertation analysis initiatives within the humanities and interpretive social sciences. This program is made doable by a grant from the Mellon Foundation.

Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowships assist graduate college students who present promise of main their fields in necessary new instructions. The fellowships are designed to intervene on the formative stage of dissertation improvement, earlier than analysis and writing are superior. The program seeks to develop the vary of analysis methodologies, codecs, and areas of inquiry historically thought of appropriate for the dissertation, with a selected give attention to supporting students who can construct a extra various, inclusive, and equitable academy.

Benefits

• The complete award features a $42,000 base stipend for the fellowship yr, in addition to as much as $3,000 for analysis and journey, and as much as $5,000 in skilled improvement funds to assist expertise acquisition or further analysis to assist modern/expansive instructions. An further $2,000 is accessible as a stipend for the exterior mentor.

Eligibility

Applicants should:

• Be a PhD scholar in a humanities or social science division within the United States.
• Be capable of take up a full yr (9-12 months) of sustained specialised analysis and coaching, launched from regular coursework, assistantships, and all educating duties.
• Have accomplished a minimum of two years and all required coursework within the PhD packages by which they’re at present enrolled by the beginning of the fellowship time period.
• Have not superior to PhD candidacy/ABD standing previous to January 1, 2025.
• Have not beforehand utilized for this fellowship greater than as soon as.

Evaluation Criteria

Reviewers on this program are requested to guage all eligible proposals on the next standards:

• The potential of the venture to advance the sector(s) of study by which it’s proposed and make an authentic and important contribution to information.
• The potential of the venture to problem scholarly conference and/or develop the prevailing norms of what constitutes necessary scholarship by means of its modern format or codecs, its novel methodology, subject material, or theoretical framework, or its significant engagement with an interdisciplinary and/or neighborhood companion. ACLS seeks candidates who’ve a powerful grasp of the present norms and tendencies of their main self-discipline of study, and who’ve taken benefit of the alternatives out there of their division and campus to advance their coaching and scholarly initiatives.
• The feasibility of the proposed venture and the probability that the applicant will execute the work inside the proposed timeframe (throughout and after the fellowship time period).
• The venture’s considerate engagement with communities which might be traditionally underrepresented in increased training, and the potential for this expertise to form analysis and scholarly apply.

Application

Applications should be submitted on-line and should embrace:

• Completed application kind.
• Proposal (not more than seven pages, double spaced, with one-inch margins, in Arial or Helvetica 11-level font, together with any footnotes or endnotes).
  • The applicant ought to describe the goals of their analysis and clearly clarify how they’ll advance these goals in the course of the fellowship interval.
  • The proposal must also embrace an outline of the coaching, workshops, journey, analysis permissions, or the rest the applicant feels will probably be essential to advance the venture in the course of the fellowship time period. For any of this stuff, however particularly within the case of analysis permissions, how will you go about securing them?
  • If the applicant has already recognized an exterior mentor, please word the mentor within the proposal and describe how that particular person was chosen. If the mentor is but to be decided, please present a quick description of what qualities and capacities you’ll search inside a mentor. What sorts of views would this mentor deliver to your venture?
  • The proposal should describe the applicant’s modern method to their dissertation venture and make a compelling argument for why the timing of the fellowship can be supreme for his or her proposed analysis and coaching and inside the context of the total timeline of their doctoral research. Applicants must also element how they’ll measure their very own success within the fellowship yr.
  • The proposal should describe the total scope of the scholarly output of the dissertation to permit reviewers to think about all the venture. For instance, if the applicant is proposing to construct a public-dealing with on-line archive, what different scholarly supplies (A multi-chapter written dissertation? A collection of articles?) will accompany the proposed fellowship-yr actions?
• Optional: Up to 2 further pages of photos, musical scores, or different comparable supporting non-textual content supplies, with out annotation
• A one-web page timeline, in Arial or Helvetica 11-level font, outlining fellowship yr exercise with provisional sketch of publish-fellowship trajectory, outlining the time main as much as the completion of the dissertation. All candidates should use the timeline template offered by ACLS.
• Bibliography (with out annotation, single-spaced, in Arial or Helvetica 11-level font, not more than two pages, with one-inch margins)
• Short private assertion (not more than two pages, double spaced, with one-inch margins, in Arial or Helvetica 11-level font) describing your journey as a scholar and the way your work comes collectively on the nexus of private expertise, analysis pursuits, and need to shift the varieties and codecs of educational analysis.
• A short work pattern (not more than fifteen pages complete, double spaced, with one-inch margins, together with any photos and footnotes or endnotes, in Arial or Helvetica 11-level font), together with a quick description of context and the pattern’s relation to the proposed venture.
• One letter of advice. The letter should come from the applicant’s dissertation advisor, or a school member eligible to be the advisor.
• An announcement from the applicant’s establishment (ideally from the applicant’s division chair, director of graduate research, or dean). The offered kind will ask the institutional consultant to attest that (1) if the applicant holds a multi-yr monetary award from the establishment and a fellowship is awarded, this assist can be paused during the fellowship and the applicant can be allowed to retain and resume the rest of that assist in subsequent years; (2) the establishment will permit the guy to stay enrolled in the course of the fellowship yr and can waive tuition and costs; and (3) the intention of the fellowship is to advertise non-conventional course setting for the sake of valuing improvements in scholarly strategies and topic, and the establishment believes that its graduate curriculum and progress-charting for college kids can respect and accommodate this exploration of non-conventional approaches to scholarship.

Click here to apply

For extra data, go to Mellon/ACLS Fellowship.