ACLS Awards 36 Project Development Grants
The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) is pleased to announce the 2025 ACLS Project Development Grant recipients. The $5,000 grants support scholars in teaching-intensive faculty roles who are undertaking promising research in the humanities and social sciences. In 2025, ACLS has more than doubled the number of ACLS Project Development Grants to offer a total of $180,000 in funding to 36 awardees.
“ACLS is thrilled to name the largest cohort of Project Development Grantees in the history of the program,” said Nike Nivar Ortiz, ACLS Program Officer in US Programs. “These seed grants will help scholars working across 34 institutions advance their research agendas. ”
The 2025 ACLS Project Development Grantees represent a wide range of institutions and fields of humanistic inquiry, including comparative literature, film and media studies, philosophy, religious studies, and sociology. Funded projects include research on working- and lower-middle class women’s narratives in the modernist period; an ethnographic, comparative study of evolving China-Central America relations; an examination of tattooing customs in the premodern world; and a study that posits Algerian women as agents of decolonization by exploring feminist solidarity across the Global South.
Project Development Grants offer flexible support to meet the specific needs of each scholar and help advance their proposed research project. Each grantee receives $5,000, which can cover the costs of any activity that can advance their research, including travel to the field or collections, learned society membership and conference attendance, course buyout or summer salary, child- or eldercare, or editorial or research assistance.
Project Development Grants are competitive and awarded as a component of the ACLS Fellowship Program. The program is funded by the ACLS endowment, which has benefited from the generous support of esteemed funders, institutional members, and individual donors since our founding in 1919.