ACLS Dissertation-completion and Early-career postdoctoral fellowships opportunities for scholars in Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, and Uganda

The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), a private, nonprofit federation of 71 national scholarly organizations, is the preeminent representative of American scholarship in the humanities and related social sciences. It works towards “the advancement of humanistic studies in all fields of learning in the humanities and the social sciences and the maintenance and strengthening of relations among the national societies devoted to such studies.”

Call for Applications

ACLS, with financial support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, under the African Humanities Program is currently seeking applications for:

•        Dissertation-completion fellowships in Ghana, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Uganda
•        Early-career postdoctoral fellowships in Ghana, Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda, and South Africa

About the Fellowships

Fellowship support is in the form of stipends: $10,000 for dissertation-completion Fellows and $17,000 for postdoctoral Fellows, plus an additional $1,000 per Fellow for books and media. Fellowships are intended to release recipients from teaching and other duties for an academic year so as to permit fulltime research and writing. (They may be used to “buy time.”) Recipients of both kinds of fellowship are also eligible for further support in the form of a residency at a participating research center in sub-Saharan Africa for a sustained period of writing away from a Fellow’s home institution. Approximately forty fellowships will be awarded annually in all five countries combined. Awards will be decided by an international committee of distinguished scholars in the humanities.

Eligibility

• Dissertation applicants must be doctoral candidates in the final year of writing the dissertation.
• Postdoctoral candidates must be scholars who have obtained the Ph.D. within the past five years.
• All applicants must be citizens of a sub-Saharan African country residing and working in Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, or Uganda.

Eligible Projects

Proposed projects must be in the humanities, defined by the study of history, language, and culture, and by qualitative approaches in research. The list of humanities disciplines includes anthropology, studies of the fine and performing arts, history, linguistics, literature studies, studies of religion, and philosophy.

Projects in social sciences such as economics, sociology, or political science, as well as in law or international relations, are not eligible unless they are clearly humanistic in content and focus.

Selection Criteria

• the intrinsic interest and substantive merit of the work proposed
• the clarity with which the intellectual agenda is presented
• the record of achievement of postdoctoral scholars and the promise of Ph.D. candidates
• the contribution the work is likely to make to scholarship in the region as well as internationally
• the feasibility of the work plan

Last date for submission of applications is November 1, 2011

For more information and details, you can visit this link.