The American Council of Learned Societies has announced the summer 2021 cohort of Leading Edge Fellows who will work over the next year with nonprofits committed to promoting social justice in their communities.

Launched in 2020 with support from the Henry Luce and Andrew W. Mellon foundations and expanded for this third cohort with a $3.6 million grant from Mellon, the Leading Edge Fellowships places recent PhD recipients in the humanities and interpretive social sciences with nonprofits, where they lead substantive projects, drawing on skills and capacities such as advanced communication, research, project management, and creative problem solving. Fellows receive annual stipends of $60,000, health insurance coverage, and access to professional development funding and activities.

The forty-one summer 2021 fellows include Lindsay N. Amaral (history, University of Houston) and Gabrielle G. Gonzales (sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara), who will work with Hunger Free America to study how SNAP benefits impact recipients' lives; Xavier Buck (history, University of California, Berkeley) and Sara Partridge (English, New York University), who will help develop a new Center for Social Justice at the Thurgood Marshall College Fund; and Rohma A. Khan (history, University of Rochester), who will work with One Fair Wage to conduct research into workers' reports of facing harassment, increased health risk, and public health responsibilities for far less income during the COVID-19 pandemic.

"ACLS is proud to partner with the Mellon Foundation to award an unprecedented number of publicly engaged postdoctoral fellowships through the Leading Edge Fellowship program," said ACLS president Joy Connolly. "As we look forward with hope to our emergence from the pandemic, we also feel a sense of urgency in helping humanistic scholars work with others to create a better, more inclusive future. This impressive group reflects our commitment to supporting early career scholars and recognizing the power humanistic knowledge and inquiry have to help shape the world beyond campus."

For a complete list of summer 2021 Leading Edge Fellows, see the ACLS website.