ACLS Humanities and Social Science Fellowships 2025: How to Win Up to 60000 for Full Time Writing and Research

If you work in the humanities or interpretive social sciences, you already know the bad joke: the world wants your teaching and your service, but your actual research time survives on scraps and stolen weekends. The ACLS Fellowship Program is one of the few opportunities that flips that script.

This is serious time and serious money: up to $60,000 for 12 months (at $5,000 per month, with a $30,000 minimum) for you to step away from the grading grind and focus on the book, digital project, edition, or public humanities work that will actually define your career.

For the 2025–26 round, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) expects to award up to 60 fellowships. The competition is tough, no question—but it is also winnable, especially if you understand what ACLS really cares about: strong scholarship, feasible plans, and a clear commitment to equity and inclusion within the humanities.

This isn’t a residency where you must uproot your life or move to a specific city. The ACLS fellowship is portable. You can hold it at your home institution, another institution, an archive, your kitchen table—wherever your research actually happens.

And if you’re adjunct, contingent, or independent, ACLS doesn’t just invite you to the table; it pays attention to your realities. On top of the main stipend, contingent and independent fellows get an extra $3,000–$6,000 to help cover research expenses, insurance, conference travel, or caregiving costs. That supplement can be the difference between “technically funded” and “practically possible.”

If you’ve been waiting for a sign that you should give your book or major project a real shot, this is it.

ACLS Fellowship at a Glance

What This Humanities Fellowship Actually Offers

Think of the ACLS Fellowship as a sabbatical that doesn’t require your institution to care that much about your research. It gives you time, money, and legitimacy—three ingredients humanities scholars rarely get in the same place.

The money is straightforward: you receive $5,000 per month, for 6–12 months, capped at $60,000, with a guaranteed minimum of $30,000. That’s real salary replacement for many people, or a substantial top-up if you’re combining it with other support.

If you’re teaching off the tenure track or working as an independent researcher, the additional $3,000–$6,000 supplement is tailored to realities that standard grants often ignore. Maybe you need childcare to go to an archive. Maybe your health insurance is completely on you. Maybe you need to hire a translator or pay for high-resolution image rights. ACLS is explicit: that supplement can go to things like research costs, insurance, travel, or caregiving.

The time is just as critical. This isn’t funding that lets you “do some research on the side.” Fellows are expected to pursue full-time research or writing for the entire duration of the fellowship. That means you can actually plan ambitious work: a complete book manuscript instead of just one chapter; a digital project with real usability instead of one lonely prototype page.

Then there’s the platform. ACLS is one of the most recognizable names in humanities funding. Having “ACLS Fellow” on your CV changes how deans, presses, and hiring committees read your work. It signals that scholars beyond your subfield think your project matters.

And quietly but powerfully, this program is geared toward inclusive excellence. Reviewers pay attention to who you are, what you’ve had access to, and whom your work brings into the conversation. That means a compelling project coming out of a heavily teaching-focused institution, or from a scholar who’s spent years in contingent roles, can be extremely competitive.

If your project can reasonably culminate in a major scholarly contribution—a monograph, a critical edition, a digital archive, a public-facing collaboration—this fellowship gives you the runway to land it well.

Who Should Apply (With Realistic Examples)

Formally, ACLS wants people who:

• Have a PhD in the humanities or interpretive social sciences (or a publication record that truly matches that level).
• Belong to one of several U.S.-connected residency or citizenship categories.
• Can commit to 6–12 consecutive months of full-time work between July 1, 2026 and July 1, 2027.

Informally, here’s who I’d say should be paying very close attention.

1. Early- to mid-career faculty trying to finish a first or second book.
Maybe you’re an assistant professor at a regional public where you teach a 4/4 load and sit on three committees by default. You’ve done the archival work in chunks over summers, and now you need a year to actually write the book that will make or break your tenure case. ACLS is built for this kind of situation—especially if you can show how your institutional context has shaped both your time and your questions.

2. Contingent and adjunct scholars who have big, serious projects.
You might be working three contracts at three campuses, carrying a publishing record that rivals tenure-track peers but with no sabbatical in sight. ACLS is one of the rare programs that doesn’t treat your status as a side issue; it adds actual money on top of the stipend to make the fellowship workable. If your project is strong and you show a clear plan to use this time to produce a major output, you belong in this applicant pool.

3. Independent researchers and public humanities practitioners.
Maybe you left academia, or you never went all-in on a traditional path, but your work is deeply engaged with archival materials, museums, community collaborators, or digital platforms. As long as your project uses humanistic methods and leads to a substantial, shareable product, you can be competitive. Use your personal statement to explain your trajectory and why independence gives your project particular strength.

4. Senior scholars without a PhD but with a substantial record.
If you’ve built a strong publication profile in an eligible field—say, you have major books, widely used editions, or digital projects—ACLS explicitly considers “equivalent scholarly record” in place of a doctorate. You will need your publications list and writing sample to carry a lot of weight, but it’s possible.

On eligibility categories, you’re in range if you are:

• A U.S. citizen or permanent resident;
• An Indigenous person with Jay Treaty rights;
• A DACA recipient, asylee, refugee, or TPS holder; or
• A foreign national who’s been living in the U.S. or its territories for at least three consecutive years before the deadline and does not move elsewhere during the fellowship.

If you’re tenure-track, there’s an extra rule: there must be at least a two-year gap between the end of your last supported research leave (of a semester or more) and September 1, 2026. In other words, ACLS is not your back-to-back sabbatical stacker; it’s intended to support those who’ve not just had a year off.

What You Have to Commit To

Every fellow must commit to:

• 6–12 consecutive months of full-time research or writing;
• A start date between July 1, 2026 and July 1, 2027;
• Completing the fellowship by December 31, 2027.

“Full-time” means exactly that. You can potentially keep very minimal teaching or administrative work with ACLS approval, but if your fellowship year looks like “teach 3/3 and write on weekends,” reviewers will smell that from your work plan.

For contingent faculty whose contracts are messy, ACLS provides guidance about how to structure your fellowship months within the eligible window. But your application still needs to present a coherent, continuous work plan.

Required Materials and How to Make Them Work for You

The ACLS application is not short, but every piece has a job. All narrative documents must be in 11-point Arial or Helvetica, double-spaced, with one-inch margins. Footnotes can be a bit smaller and single-spaced.

You’ll need to prepare:

• A completed online form with biographical info, teaching load, project metadata, and your planned fellowship dates.
• A project proposal (max 5 pages) that explains your questions, methods, sources, theoretical contributions, and expected outcomes. This is where you prove the project matters.
• An optional up to 2 pages of supporting materials (images, scores, maps, datasets) if they clarify your evidence or methods.
• A work plan (1 page) that lays out, month by month, what you’ll actually do.
• A bibliography (up to 2 pages) showing you know the scholarly conversation you’re entering.
• A publications list (up to 2 pages), ideally organized by type and clearly labeled for works in progress and public-facing work.
• A personal statement (1 page) telling the story of your trajectory, your mentoring or teaching commitments, and how you align with ACLS’s equity focus.
• A writing sample (up to 8 pages) with a brief note at the top explaining where it fits in your project.

Notice what’s missing: no reference letters. That changes the strategy. You don’t have recommenders filling in the backstory of your teaching load, your impact on students, or the structural hurdles you’ve navigated. You must write that context yourself, especially in the personal statement and short asides in the proposal.

Also required: an ORCID iD. If you don’t have one yet, plan to register and clean it up early; ACLS uses ORCID to track fellows’ outcomes.

Insider Tips for a Winning ACLS Application

This competition is not a casual “submit something while you’re on your phone” situation. Treat it like a serious writing project, because it is.

1. Start early and draft badly on purpose

Strong ACLS proposals usually take 40–60 hours of work. If you’re starting in early July for a late September deadline, that means blocking off actual calendar time.

Your first aim is not to write something elegant; it’s to get all required sections drafted. A complete but ugly draft by mid-August is infinitely better than a half-finished “perfect” paragraph on page one.

2. Make your significance legible beyond your subfield

Your reviewers will not all be experts in your niche. Write for a smart colleague down the hall who knows what “critical edition” means but not the last twenty years of debates in your specialty.

Spell out why your project matters:

• What gap does it address?
• Whose voices, archives, or questions are currently missing?
• Why does it matter that you are the one doing this work, from where you’re doing it?

If you’re tempted to write, “Scholars have long noted…” consider instead, “Right now, scholarship assumes X. That assumption ignores Y, with real consequences for how we understand Z. My project addresses this directly by…”

3. Demonstrate feasibility like a project manager

Ambitious scope is exciting; impossible scope gets cut. Your work plan should read like something a busy but determined human can reasonably do in 6–12 months.

Avoid the “I will visit 12 archives on 3 continents and write a full book” plan unless you’ve already done a huge chunk of the legwork and can prove it. Show where the project is now, what’s already done, and what this fellowship specifically buys you in terms of time and travel.

Name risks and your backup strategies. If an archive might be closed, what then? If travel becomes unsafe or impossible, do you have digitized sources, interviews, or alternative cases?

4. Make inclusive excellence concrete, not rhetorical

ACLS genuinely cares about inclusion, but reviewers can spot vague gestures a mile away. Instead of saying, “I am committed to equity,” show it:

• Briefly describe mentoring you do with first-gen students.
• Explain how your syllabus or community partnership centers marginalized voices.
• Show how your project makes new sources available, in accessible forms, to communities beyond the academy.

Tie this back to the project, not as a side hustle, but as something structurally built into your design.

5. Use your personal statement strategically

Too many applicants treat the personal statement as a mini-bio. Use it as a context document.

If you teach a heavy load, spell it out with numbers. If you juggle caregiving, service, and research, say so without drama but with clarity. If you’ve been contingent for years, explain how that’s shaped your project choices and pace.

This isn’t a pity pitch. It’s information reviewers need to understand why, say, two articles and several public-facing collaborations are impressive given your conditions, not underwhelming.

6. Get feedback from outside your field

Have at least:

• One person in your subfield read for accuracy;
• One person in a different humanities field read for clarity;
• One person who is frankly a bit impatient read for narrative energy.

If they’re confused or bored, reviewers will be too. Revise accordingly.

7. Mirror, but do not mimic, ACLS language

Read the official call carefully and notice the words they use for priorities: “inclusive excellence,” “major scholarly contribution,” “interpretive social sciences,” “public engagement.” Use some of that vocabulary where it genuinely fits your project so reviewers immediately see alignment—but don’t turn your proposal into buzzword soup.

Application Timeline: Working Backward from September 25, 2025

You could technically throw something together in late September. You also could technically try writing your entire book in one caffeine-fueled weekend. Neither tends to end well.

Here’s a more realistic approach:

May–June 2025
Confirm you’re eligible, including the tenure-track leave rule and residency categories. Block writing time on your calendar. Gather key notes, drafts, and data so you’re not chasing files later.

Early July 2025
Register or update your ORCID iD. Open an account at the ACLS application portal (https://ofa.acls.org). Sketch a one-page version of your project: central question, corpus, method, output, and why it matters.

July–early August 2025
Draft the 5-page proposal, 1-page work plan, bibliography, publications list, personal statement, and writing sample selection. Don’t worry yet if they’re messy; just make sure every required component exists in some form.

Mid–late August 2025
Circulate drafts to mentors, writing groups, and trusted colleagues (especially people who have applied to ACLS before). Revise for clarity, significance, and feasibility. Audit your CV and publications list so they align with how you present your trajectory.

Early September 2025
Tighten formatting: correct font, spacing, margins, and page limits. Write concise headers in your proposal to guide reviewers (“Research Questions,” “Methods and Sources,” “Significance,” etc.).

Mid-September 2025
Upload polished versions to the portal. Double-check file names and page counts. Preview how documents display in the system. Fix any strange formatting before the stress kicks in.

By September 23, 2025
Aim to submit two days early. Servers fail. Wi-Fi drops. Your institution forces an unexpected password reset. Give yourself margin.

September 25, 2025, 9:00 p.m. EDT
Absolute cut-off. No late materials. No late “oops, I forgot my writing sample.” Treat this as non-negotiable.

October 2025–March 2026
Go back to your normal overcommitted life. Keep a running list of any new publications, awards, or project milestones in case ACLS requests updates. Notification comes in late March 2026.

What Reviewers Look For and How to Deliver It

ACLS publishes its criteria, but applicants often underestimate how directly they map onto the scores.

Reviewers are asking:

1. Does this project substantially advance knowledge?
   They want more than “I’ll be the first to look at this archive.” Show how your intervention shifts an existing debate, complicates an assumption, or brings new evidence or voices into view. Frame your contribution against clearly identified conversations.

2. Is the approach methodologically strong and, ideally, fresh?
   You don’t need fancy digital bells and whistles, but you do need to show that your methods make sense for your questions. If your approach is innovative, explain why that matters rather than assuming the shine speaks for itself.

3. Can this be done in the time and with the resources requested?
   That’s where your work plan and track record come in. If you propose to write four chapters, show that you’ve already drafted one or done the core research for three. Reviewers are wary of “someday” projects.

4. Does the applicant’s record support the plan, given their context?
   They will read your CV differently if you’re teaching a 5/5 load than if you’ve had multiple leaves. Use your personal statement to frame your output relative to your constraints and commitments.

5. How does this project and person advance inclusive excellence?
   They’re looking both at content (what you study, whose voices appear) and practice (how you mentor, collaborate, and share). Show, concretely, how your project widens who gets to participate in, or benefit from, humanistic inquiry.

You don’t need to label sections according to these five points, but you do need each one covered somewhere, clearly enough that a reviewer can underline the paragraph and think, “There it is.”

Common ACLS Application Mistakes (And How to Avoid Them)

1. Writing only for insiders.
If a non-specialist can’t follow your argument by page two, you’re in trouble. Ask a colleague outside your field to mark every sentence where they get lost, then revise ruthlessly.

2. Hiding the main argument until page four.
Don’t build suspense. Your core claim or question should appear in the first paragraph of your proposal, not after three pages of literature review.

3. Vague or magical thinking about time.
“During the fellowship, I will complete my book” is not a plan. “Months 1–2: complete sections X and Y using sources already gathered from Archive A; Months 3–4: revise chapter 3 and draft chapter 4,” etc.—that’s a plan.

4. Ignoring your own constraints.
If you pretend you have unlimited time and support, reviewers will either not believe you or assume you’re detached from reality. Instead, name your constraints and show how the fellowship changes the math.

5. Treating public or community work as an optional flourish.
If your project has public dimensions, foreground them. Who will use your work? How will they access it? What forms (website, exhibit, curriculum materials, podcasts) will that take?

6. Blowing off formatting rules.
Single spacing your proposal to cram in more content doesn’t look clever; it looks like you can’t follow instructions. ACLS has disqualified applications for formatting violations. Don’t be that story.

Frequently Asked Questions About the ACLS Fellowship

Can I apply with a collaborative project?
Yes, but the fellowship funds individual scholars. If you’re part of a team, your application must spell out what part of the larger project is yours, what you’ll accomplish during the fellowship term, and how that work advances the collaborative effort.

Are reference letters really not required?
Correct. For this competition cycle, there are no recommendation letters. That means you cannot rely on senior people to explain your merits, context, or impact. Build that directly into your proposal and personal statement.

Can I teach while on the fellowship?
The expectation is full-time research or writing. A very limited teaching assignment or short administrative duty might be approved, but anything substantial will hurt both your feasibility and, frankly, your odds. If you plan to teach one small course, address it honestly and explain how your schedule still prioritizes the project.

What if my project shifts after I submit?
Projects evolve. If you’re funded and something major changes—an archive closes, you change institutions, the scope narrows or expands—you’ll need to talk with ACLS staff. Minor adjustments to chapter order or case studies are usually fine; wholesale reimagining requires approval.

How is the stipend paid?
Payment is arranged individually after selection. Some fellows receive funds directly; others have them processed through a host institution. Installments are released once paperwork and any institutional agreements are complete. Build in a little buffer in your financial planning while that’s processed.

Can I combine ACLS with other funding or a sabbatical?
Often, yes, within ACLS income rules. If your institution pays half salary for a sabbatical and ACLS covers the rest, you must show clearly how the two sources work together without overpaying you by program standards. Clarify this in your application; don’t surprise ACLS later.

Is there any fallback if I do not get the full fellowship?
Possibly. Some highly rated applications from teaching-intensive institutions may receive Project Development Grants of around $5,000 instead of the full fellowship. That’s not guaranteed, but it’s one more reason to submit your best work even if you feel like a “long shot.”

What about the Cullman Center or named fellowships?
You’re automatically considered for several named ACLS fellowships in specific fields (e.g., English and American literature, Chinese history, ancient American art and culture). If you’re interested in the New York Public Librarys Cullman Center joint fellowship, you must submit a separate Cullman application by September 26, 2025, in addition to the ACLS fellowship application.

How to Apply and What To Do Next

If you’re even moderately serious about this, don’t just bookmark and move on. Treat the next few weeks as the planning phase of your own fellowship campaign.

1. Read the official ACLS call carefully.
   Start here for full details:
   ACLS Fellowship Program page: https://www.acls.org/competitions/acls-fellowships/

2. Open an account in the application portal.
   Go to https://ofa.acls.org and create or update your profile. Add your ORCID iD and make sure your contact information is current.

3. Draft a one-page project brief.
   Before you get lost in formatting rules, write a single page that answers: What am I doing? Why does it matter? What will exist at the end of the fellowship that doesn’t exist now?

4. Map your writing and revision schedule backwards from September 25, 2025.
   Put real deadlines on your calendar for first drafts, feedback rounds, and final edits. Treat these as seriously as any classroom obligation.

5. Build your feedback circle.
   Ask two or three colleagues if they’re willing to read a draft in August or early September. Offer to trade reads; everyone in the humanities needs this kind of mutual aid.

6. Align your story.
   Make sure your proposal, personal statement, publications list, and writing sample all point to the same coherent intellectual trajectory: who you are as a scholar, what you work on, and why ACLS support now would change what’s possible.

Ready to apply? Start with the official opportunity page and the portal:

• Official competition details: https://www.acls.org/competitions/acls-fellowships/
• Application system: https://ofa.acls.org

If you’re somewhere between “this sounds amazing” and “I’m not sure I’m good enough,” apply anyway. ACLS is competitive, but it’s not reserved for a tiny club of R1 superstars. It’s for scholars doing serious, thoughtful, impactful work in the humanities and interpretive social sciences—and that might very well be you.