Alicia Carroll, assistant professor of comparative literature at the University of California, Irvine, has been named a 2021-2022 American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) fellow.
Carroll is one of sixty scholars chosen for the fellowship nationwide from a pool of nearly 1,300 applications. The longest running program in the organization’s portfolio, the ACLS Fellowship program supports outstanding scholarship in the humanities and humanistic social sciences with the potential to make significant contributions to knowledge within and across fields.
Carroll will use the fellowship to work on her book project, Indiscipline: Queering Native American Autobiography. This book will examine written autobiographies by Hopi people who lived through the Indian assimilation era (1887-1943). Focusing on boarding school narratives, the project demonstrates how colonial institutions imposed Euro-American gender and sexuality norms onto Native students to dismantle Indigenous social structures, including non-binary gender systems, relationality, and communalism.
"I'm grateful to the ACLS for limiting this year's fellowship applicant eligibility to untenured scholars,” Carroll said. “After a year of devastating loss, social injustice and consequential setbacks in my research and writing agenda, I'm encouraged by the opportunity to devote a year to completing my first book and other requirements for earning tenure. I hope that my book will amplify the voices of the Hopi People, who have taught me invaluable knowledge, and contribute to Indigenous reclamation movements and collective liberation from settler colonialism."
“ACLS is deeply proud to support emerging scholars of special promise and to advance important research representing perspectives on the human experience that have traditionally been marginalized,” said ACLS President Joy Connolly in a news release. “With more than forty percent of the 2021 ACLS Fellows identifying as scholars of color and a third as first-generation college students, we are excited to continue our work in forging paths of opportunity and models of inclusive excellence in humanistic scholarship.”