American Council of Learned Societies honors four Penn State scholars

American Council of Learned Societies honors four Penn State scholars

New York -- The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), a private, nonprofit federation of 70 national scholarly organizations, has honored two Penn State faculty members with grants and two recent University doctoral degree graduates with two-year academic fellowships.

Erica F. Brindley, assistant professor of history and religious studies, has received two grants. She has been awarded a Charles A. Ryskamp Research Fellowship grant for her project "Who Were the Yue (Viet) and Where Did They Go? A Critical Approach to Ethnicity and Culture Change along China's Ancient Southern Frontier, 200 BCE-200 CE." The Charles A. Ryskamp Research Fellowships provide advanced assistant professors and untenured associate professors in the humanities and related social sciences with time and resources to pursue their research under optimal conditions. Specifically, they recognize those whose scholarly contributions have advanced their fields and who have well designed and carefully developed plans for new research.

Brindley also has received a grant from the New Perspectives on Chinese Culture and Society program for her project "Re-evaluating Religion, Philosophy and the Arts of Early China Through Excavated Texts: Excavated Texts from Chu." The New Perspectives on Chinese Culture and Society program offers funding for planning meetings, workshops and conferences in support of scholarship that bridges disciplinary or geographic boundaries, engages new kinds of information, develops fresh approaches to traditional materials and issues, or otherwise brings innovative perspectives to the study of Chinese culture and society. The 2010-11 competition solicits proposals that adopt an explicitly cross-cultural or comparative perspective.

Alexander C. Y. Huang, associate professor of comparative literature, has been honored with a grant from the American Research in the Humanities in China program for his project titled "A History of Modern Chinese Humor." The American Research in the Humanities in China program awards grants to U.S. scholars for research in China for periods of four to 12 months. Support is offered to specialists in all fields of the humanities and humanities-related social sciences, and is not limited to China scholars.

Amy Clukey and Ashley Marshall, who each received a doctoral degree from Penn State's Department of English in 2009, have been named ACLS New Faculty Fellows. Clukey has received her fellowship appointment in English and comparative literature at the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race at Columbia University for the academic years 2010 and 2011. Marshall has received her fellowship appointment at Johns Hopkins University for academic years 2010 and 2011. The ACLS New Faculty Fellows program allows recent doctoral degree recipients in the humanities to take up two-year positions at universities and colleges across the United States where their particular research and teaching expertise augment departmental offerings.

ACLS is the preeminent representative of American scholarship in the humanities and related social sciences. Founded in 1919, its mission is "the advancement of humanistic studies in all fields of learning in the humanities and the social sciences and the maintenance and strengthening of relations among the national societies devoted to such studies." Awarding peer-reviewed fellowships is central to its work. Since 1957, more than 9,200 scholars have held ACLS fellowships and grants. In 2010, awards totaling over $15 million were made to more than 380 U.S.-based and international scholars.