Four Named Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellows

Four doctoral candidates in the UC Davis College of Letters and Science have been awarded yearlong fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies to research and write their dissertations.

Julio Aguilar, Dmitri Brown and Lucia Luna-Victoria Indacochea in the history graduate program and Brittani Orona in Native American studies are among 72 doctoral students nationwide named 2021 Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellows on April 29. They were selected from a pool of more than 1,000 applicants in the humanities and interpretive social sciences.

Each fellow receives an award of $43,000 to support the final year of dissertation research and writing. In addition, fellows participate in a career development seminar to help them prepare for postdoctoral opportunities within and beyond the academy. The program, now in its 15th year, is made possible by a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

“ACLS is proud to support this exceptional cohort of emerging scholars, one third of whom identify as first-generation college students and two thirds of whom identify as scholars of color, as they pursue important new directions in humanistic scholarship,” said ACLS President Joy Connolly. “During a time of increased need for early-career scholars, this program allows us to invest in the future of the humanities, thanks to the continued commitment of the Mellon Foundation.”

The UC Davis fellows are investigating a search for water in a Bolivian silver mining town, Tewa Pueblo stories of the atomic age, the struggle for survival in a Peruvian shantytown, and a movement by Hupa, Yurok and Karuk activists to remove four Klamath River dams in Oregon and Northern California.

— Kathleen Holder, content strategist in the UC Davis College of Letters and Science