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Faculty members Conlan, Guenther win ACLS fellowships for humanistic research

By
Karin Dienst, Office of Communications
on May 4, 2018, 11:23 a.m.
Photo by
Nick Barberio, Office of Communications

Princeton faculty members Thomas Conlan and Katja Guenther have been awarded fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, which funds humanistic research.

Thomas Conlan

Thomas Conlan

Photo courtesy of the Department of East Asian Studies

This year the ACLS gave 78 awards — the highest in the history of the program. Peer reviewers selected the fellows from a pool of nearly 1,150 applicants. Awards range from $40,000 to $70,000, depending on the scholar’s career stage, and support scholars for six to 12 months of full-time research and writing.

Katja Guenther

Katja Guenther

Photo by
Denise Applewhite, Office of Communications

“Fellows were selected for their potential to make an original and significant contribution to knowledge, resulting from research on cultures, texts and artifacts from antiquity to the present, in contexts around the world,” said Matthew Goldfeder, director of the fellowship programs at ACLS in announcing the awards.

Conlan, a professor of  East Asian studies and history, will pursue his research project, “Kings in All but Name: The Rise of the Ōuchi, 1350-1465, and Japan’s Age of Yamaguchi, 1466-1551.”

Guenther, an associate professor of history, will pursue her research project, “The Mirror and the Mind: A History of Self-Recognition in the Sciences of Mind and Brain.”

The American Council of Learned Societies is a private, nonprofit federation of 75 national scholarly organizations that seeks to advance studies in all fields in the humanities and the social sciences. This year, ACLS will award more than $20 million to over 350 scholars across a variety of humanistic disciplines.

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