2 Ph.D. Graduates Receive ACLS Fellowships

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Recent Duke Ph.D. graduates Joella Bitter and Farren Yero have received American Council of Learned Societies Fellowships for 2021.

The ACLS is a century-old nonprofit federation of 75 scholarly organizations and works to promote American scholarship in the humanities and related social sciences. ACLS Fellows receive $30,000 to $60,000 for 6 to 12 months of research leave to work full-time on a major piece of scholarly work, which can be a monograph, articles, digital publications, critical edition, or other scholarly resources.

Bitter, a 2020 Ph.D. graduate in cultural anthropology, is currently a lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Virginia. Her ACLS Fellowship will support a project titled The Aural City: Sensory Politics in the Making of Gulu, Uganda. The project, which will include a book and an audio installation, grew out of Bitter’s dissertation research on the soundscape of a burgeoning Ugandan city.

Yero, a 2020 Ph.D. graduate in history, is currently a postdoctoral scholar in Duke’s Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies. Her ACLS Fellowship will support her work on a book titled Atlantic Antidote: Race, Gender, and the Birth of the First Vaccine. Yero had previously received a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship to support her Ph.D. research on the subject.

Another of this year’s 60 ACLS Fellows also has a Duke connection: John MacNeill Miller, who earned his bachelor’s in English from Duke in 2006, will use his award to produce a project titled On Background: Scenery, Ecology, and the Social Novel.