ACLS Fellowships 2026-27: How to Get Up to $60,000 for a Year of Humanities or Interpretive Social Science Research

ACLS Fellowships 2026-27: How to Get Up to $60,000 for a Year of Humanities or Interpretive Social Science Research

If you are a humanities or interpretive social science scholar, this is the ACLS Fellowship you want to understand clearly before deciding whether to apply. The program is designed to do one thing well: buy you protected time to complete serious scholarship.

The 2026-27 competition is open now. ACLS began accepting applications in July 2026, and completed applications are due through the online fellowship and grant administration system at ofa.acls.org no later than 5:00 PM Eastern Time on September 17, 2026. Every ACLS competition this year closes at 5:00 PM ET, a change worth noting if you remember the 9:00 p.m. cutoff from earlier cycles.

This page translates the official ACLS rules into practical guidance, including what changed for this cycle, what counts as a strong application, and what usually causes rejections.

What changed for the 2026-27 cycle

If you drafted an application in a previous year, do not reuse your package without checking it against the current rules. Four things are different:

• The proposal is now three pages, single-spaced — not five pages double-spaced. Every narrative component is single-spaced this year.
• No writing samples. The program will not accept them for 2026-27.
• No reference letters. Your proposal and personal statement carry all the context.
• ORCID is recommended, not required. ACLS still advises registering before you start the online form.

ACLS also published explicit AI guidance for the first time: you may use tools such as Claude or ChatGPT to help write your application, but you are responsible for the accuracy of every claim, for proper attribution, and for any hallucinated citation that ends up in front of a reviewer. ACLS encourages you to say where and how you used AI assistance.

At-a-Glance Overview

What this opportunity actually gives you

The fellowship gives you both money and time. Many grants help pay a project’s costs. ACLS specifically buys calendar space for scholarship. The stipend is $60,000 for a full twelve months, $30,000 for the six-month minimum, and $5,000 per month for anything between.

The supplement for adjunct, independent, and teaching-intensive scholars matters more than its size suggests, because it is aimed at the practical costs that otherwise eat a fellowship year: research support, access to manuscript development workshops, learned society conference attendance, health insurance, and dependent care.

Why this matters for scholars who teach heavily:

• It can make a full writing year realistically possible.
• It reduces the pressure to accept additional short-term obligations.
• It creates a clean block to produce publishable output.
• It creates a recognized credential on your CV and tenure dossier.

The award is portable. You may hold it at any site appropriate for your research or writing — home university, archive, center, or your own desk. ACLS fellows may also spend part or all of the term in residence at a member organization of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes, an optional enhancement that requires no separate application.

What the program funds and what it does not

The goal of your project should be a major piece of scholarly work: a monograph, one or more articles, a publicly engaged humanities project, a digital research project, a critical edition, or another scholarly resource. Projects at any stage — early, middle, or late — are eligible.

ACLS does not fund:

• Works of fiction, including novels and films
• Creative writing, autobiography, memoir, and creative nonfiction
• Graphic novels, graphic history, and other graphic nonfiction
• Creation or production of documentary films
• Works of the performing arts, such as musical composition or plays
• Preparation or revision of textbooks
• Projects primarily pedagogical in focus, including educational or technical impact assessments
• Translation without significant scholarly interpretation and apparatus
• Dissertation research, or research by students enrolled in a doctoral program
• Books for children or young adults, inventories of collections, guidebooks, how-to and self-help books
• Policy studies, and social science research that does not address humanistic questions or use humanistic methods

If your project needs sustained archival or field access, map that access into the work plan. For archive-heavy projects, this is often the difference between an accepted and a rejected application.

Who this is for

The program is for individuals; awards may not be divided. You can apply while working on a collaborative team, but only for your own portion, and each collaborator seeking funding must submit a separate application that specifies their individual contribution, independently meets eligibility, and explains how the work is divided.

Apply if you match one of these profiles

• Early or mid-career faculty without a clean sabbatical window who need one protected block for a book or equivalent project.
• Contingent or adjunct scholars who need a stipend plus supplemental support to cover essentials during concentrated writing.
• Independent scholars with a credible publication record and a strong project narrative.
• Established scholars without a formal PhD but with equivalent published output and a substantial completed research project.
• Scholars in any humanities or interpretive social science field with a defined methodology and a specific deliverable.

Reconsider applying now if these describe you

• Your main goal is networking rather than a specific scholarly deliverable.
• You cannot yet define a 6-12 month deliverable schedule.
• Your planned output is primarily fictional, pedagogical, or a teaching resource.
• You cannot commit any continuous period to full-time research and writing.
• You expect to revise the package after submission; ACLS evaluates what you submit.

At least 60 fellowships are available this cycle, roughly half for early career scholars. That is a competitive pool. Your job is to make it easy for reviewers to see that your proposal is both significant and feasible.

Eligibility: the exact constraints you must satisfy

1. Citizenship and residency

   You must be a U.S. citizen, a permanent resident, an Indigenous individual residing in the U.S. through rights associated with the Jay Treaty of 1794, a DACA recipient, an asylee, a refugee, or a person granted Temporary Protected Status. Foreign nationals who have lived in the United States or its territories for the three years immediately preceding the deadline also qualify, provided they do not establish permanent residence abroad during the fellowship.

2. Degree

   A PhD in the humanities or social sciences must have been conferred before the application deadline. A PhD in Education is eligible; a Doctor of Education degree is not. Doctoral students should look at the ACLS dissertation programs instead.

3. PhD-equivalent route

   If you have published scholarly work on a par with what the PhD requires, you may apply. ACLS asks for evidence of a substantial completed academic project requiring a sustained period of research, similar to a dissertation.

4. Career stage

   Open to scholars at all postdoctoral career stages, on or off the tenure track. Note that the two-year gap since a prior supported research leave, which constrained tenure-track applicants in earlier cycles, is not among this year’s stated eligibility requirements.

5. Full-time commitment

   No teaching, administrative duties, or other major activities are permitted during the award period. Tenure-track fellows must be released from all teaching and administration. Fellows without tenure-track appointments, including independent scholars and contingent faculty, may teach up to one course per semester or do the equivalent in administrative work.

6. One application, one award

   You may apply to as many ACLS programs as suit your work, but only one application per competition and deadline, and no more than one ACLS or ACLS-joint award may be accepted in a competition year. Previously rejected applications may be revised and resubmitted under current rules.

Term details that shape your planning

• The term must begin no earlier than July 1, 2027 and no later than July 1, 2028, and must conclude by December 31, 2028.
• A 12-month fellowship may start as late as January 1, 2028; a six-month fellowship as late as July 1, 2028.
• At least six months must be continuous. Remaining months may be taken separately, with at most one interruption, inside the same window.
• The fellowship cannot be deferred beyond this structure. It can be taken up in the academic year following the award or the calendar year following it, and no later.

That flexibility helps if teaching or family constraints block one semester, but you still need a coherent full-time plan for every month you claim.

Money interactions you should check before applying

An ACLS Fellowship may be held alongside other fellowships, grants, and institutional support such as sabbatical pay, within limits ACLS sets each year. For tenure-track fellows, total support from all sources during the term may not exceed your 2027-28 academic year salary, and ACLS will prorate the stipend down to keep you under that ceiling. For fellows without tenure-track contracts, combined income may not exceed 150% of the ACLS award.

Payment can be arranged through your institution or directly to you, and institutions may not deduct overhead or indirect costs from fellowship funds. If you plan to combine this with a sabbatical, work out the arithmetic before you write.

Required materials and what each part should do

Everything is submitted through OFA. Write the components as one connected package.

1. Completed application form. Keep dates, affiliations, and collaborator details consistent with the narrative.

2. Proposal — no more than three pages, single-spaced, Arial or Helvetica 11-point, inclusive of footnotes or endnotes (notes may be 10-point). Address both experts and general readers. For specialists, explain what question or problem the project addresses and why it matters to your discipline. For everyone else, define unfamiliar terms and name the implications beyond your field. Three single-spaced pages is roughly the same word budget as the old five double-spaced pages, but the density is unforgiving; cut throat-clearing first.

3. Work plan — no more than one page, single-spaced or as a timeline or chart. Say what will be done, when, and where, and show how the fellowship term advances the overall project. Month-by-month milestones with dependencies beat prose here.

4. Bibliography — no more than two pages, single-spaced, without annotation, showing the primary and secondary sources the project rests on.

5. Publications list — no more than two pages, single-spaced. This carries extra weight if you are applying through the PhD-equivalent route.

6. Personal statement — up to one page, single-spaced, describing your intellectual trajectory, how the proposed work connects to your broader research interests and personal experience, and what drew you to this topic or method. With no letters in this cycle, this page supplies context a recommender would otherwise provide.

7. Optional supporting non-text pages — up to two. Images, musical scores, or similar material, with brief descriptive captions only. Any interpretation or argument about them belongs in the proposal, not on these pages.

Formatting rules that disqualify applications

• One-inch margins on all sides, every upload.
• Any standard citation style is fine, but citations count toward the page limit of the component they appear in.
• Applications that do not follow the stated formatting guidelines are excluded from review before anyone reads the argument.

Evaluation criteria

Reviewers score four things, and it is worth writing to them directly:

1. The project’s potential to advance its field and make an original, significant contribution.
2. The quality of the proposal — clarity, methodology, scope, theoretical framework, and grounding in the relevant literature.
3. Feasibility, and the likelihood you will complete the proposed work within the term.
4. Your scholarly record and career trajectory, weighed against the resources and constraints you have had.

That fourth criterion is why the personal statement matters. ACLS explicitly asks reviewers to account for relative advantages and constraints, so context about a heavy teaching load or an interrupted career is read as relevant, not as an excuse.

Related opportunities inside the same application

• ACLS/New York Public Library Fellowships. A sub-fellowship within this program, with the same eligibility, form, and schedule, for projects that benefit from the NYPL’s Stephen A. Schwarzman Building collections. The stipend is $90,000, up to 15 fellows are hosted, and fellows must be in residence from the beginning of September 2027 through the end of May 2028. It requires a separate application to the NYPL’s Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, with three letters of recommendation, due 5:00 PM ET on Friday, September 25, 2026 — a week after the ACLS deadline and the one place letters still appear.
• ACLS Project Development Grants. $5,000 grants for finalists from teaching-intensive institutions — community colleges, baccalaureate colleges, HBCUs, and regional comprehensives — whose proposals were strong but not funded. No separate application; all eligible finalists are considered.
• Named fellowships. Awards in fields including Chinese history, ancient American art, music studies, American history, and Chinese or comparative literature are made from the general pool with no separate application.

Other ACLS competitions open this cycle

If the ACLS Fellowship is not your fit, several sibling 2026-27 competitions opened alongside it, all closing at 5:00 PM ET:

• Luce/ACLS Dissertation Fellowships in American Art — October 28, 2026
• Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowships — October 28, 2026
• ACLS HBCU Faculty Fellowships and Grants — November 11, 2026
• ACLS Leading Edge Fellowships — March 10, 2027

Practical application timeline (worked backward from September 17, 2026)

• Now through early August 2026: Confirm eligibility line by line, register an ORCID iD, and settle on your output target. Watch the recorded application webinar, available from late July.
• Early August 2026: Draft a one-page project statement and gather evidence of source and archive access. ACLS office hours run August 7 and August 20.
• Mid-August 2026: Build the first full draft of the three-page proposal and the work plan.
• Late August 2026: Draft the publications list and personal statement; assemble the bibliography.
• Late August to early September 2026: First compliance pass against page limits, single spacing, font, and margins. Office hours continue September 2, September 8, and September 14.
• Early September 2026: Circulate to two readers, one specialist and one outside your subfield.
• By September 11, 2026: Incorporate feedback and lock your text.
• September 14-15, 2026: Final formatting audit and a portal upload test.
• September 15, 2026: Target submit date, leaving room to absorb upload problems.
• September 17, 2026 at 5:00 PM ET: Hard deadline.
• By April 2027: Notification by email. Reviewer feedback can be requested through a link in your status notification; expect comments by August 2027.

Common mistakes that still dominate outcomes

1. Reusing last year’s package. A five-page double-spaced proposal and an eight-page writing sample are not this year’s requirements.
2. Vague deliverables. “Substantial progress” loses to “complete manuscript submitted to the press in month nine.”
3. Non-compliant formatting. Small violations trigger administrative exclusion before substantive review.
4. Overloaded proposals. Too much work for ten months, with no contingency, reads as unfamiliarity with your own project.
5. Treating the personal statement as filler. It replaces the letters and speaks directly to the fourth evaluation criterion.
6. Ignoring income interaction rules. Sort out the sabbatical and salary ceilings before you submit.
7. Submitting at 4:55 PM ET. Any platform issue at the deadline can waste a strong application.

Frequently asked questions

Do I need recommendation letters? Not for the ACLS Fellowship in 2026-27. You do need three for the separate ACLS/NYPL application, due September 25, 2026.

Can I teach while funded? Tenure-track fellows must be released from all teaching and administrative work. Fellows without tenure-track appointments may teach up to one course per semester, or do the equivalent in administrative work.

What if my PhD is still in progress? The degree must be officially conferred before the deadline. Doctoral students should look at the ACLS dissertation fellowships instead.

Can I hold this with a sabbatical? Yes. The stipend may be reduced so that stipend plus sabbatical salary does not exceed your full academic year salary.

Can I split the fellowship months? Yes, within the six-consecutive-month rule, with at most one interruption, and everything must fall between July 1, 2027 and December 31, 2028.

Can I resubmit a previously rejected proposal? Yes. It must meet this competition’s eligibility and format rules, and you do not need to address earlier submissions, since most reviewers change year to year.

Official links you should keep handy

• Competition page: https://www.acls.org/competitions/acls-fellowships/
• ACLS Fellowship FAQ: https://www.acls.org/faqs/faq-acls-fellowships/
• Online Fellowship and Grant Application portal (OFA): https://ofa.acls.org
• ORCID registration: https://orcid.org/

Why this can be worth your time

For the right project, this is one of the few awards in the U.S. humanities system that directly values a protected year — or half-year plus a follow-up block — for substantial scholarly production. The practical advantage is not only the stipend; it is the structure, which forces a focused timeline and gives you room to do the intellectual work that teaching cycles tend to postpone.

If your project can be stated with precision and scheduled credibly, and you satisfy the eligibility rules, apply. If not, treat the gap as planning feedback rather than a verdict. Strong fellowship applications are as much about clarity and feasibility as about scholarly excellence.