African Humanities Program in Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, and Uganda.

The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), with financial support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, announces competitions for:

• Dissertation-completion fellowships in Ghana, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Uganda.
• Early career postdoctoral fellowships in Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, and Uganda South Africans may apply only for postdoctoral fellowships (not for dissertation completion).
• Fellowship recipients may request residence at an institute for advanced study in sub-Saharan Africa.

Stipends are $9,000 for dissertations and $16,000 for postdoctoral work. Fellowships are intended to release recipients from teaching and other duties for an academic year to permit full-time for research and writing. (They may be used to “buy time.”).

Approximately 40 fellowships will be awarded annually in all five countries combined. Awards will be decided by an international committee of distinguished humanities scholars.

Fellowship Application Eligibility Criteria: Applicants

• Dissertation applicants must be doctoral candidates in the final year of writing the dissertation.
• Postdoctoral candidates must be scholars who have obtained the PhD 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.

Fellowship Application Eligibility Criteria: 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 PhD candidates
• the contribution the work is likely to make to scholarship in the region as well as internationally
• the feasibility of the work plan.

The ACLS AFRICAN HUMANITIES PROGRAM seeks to promote diversity (in terms of discipline, institution, region, gender, and historical disadvantage) for the sake of excellence in humanities scholarship.

Applications are welcome from all eligible scholars in Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, and Uganda.

Application Deadline: December.

For printed versions, please write to the African Humanities Program: ahp [at] acls.org