I may be a bit late on this one (not sure when it was announced), but the 2006 winners of American Council of Learned Society Fellowships have been named. Only one philosopher was a winner this year (out of sixty awards): Steven Crowell from Rice University for a project on "Heidegger and the Claims of Reason." A rather large number of historians (I haven't counted them all up) were winners. Two or three philosophers have usually won ACLS Fellowships in recent years.
I'd be interested in hearing from philosophers (e-mail me) who applied during the 2005-06 cycle and weren't chosen. I'll keep this information confidential, but I may post in a general way about some of the issues that Jason Stanley and I have raised in prior posts (for example, here and here) if it turns out that there is an area bias at work here too.
Of local interest, political scientist Catherine Boone of UT Austin also won an ACLS Fellowship this year.
UPDATE: A reader points out that philosophers have won some of the other ACLS Fellowships this year. For example, the ACLS Ryskamp Fellowship for junior faculty was given to one philosopher, Nadeem Hussain at Stanford, for a project on "Norms in Action: Metaethics and the Neo-Kantian Critique"; while the Burkhardt Fellowship for support of recently tenured faculty, in connection with their stay at a national research center, also went to a philosopher, Gordon Belot at the University of Pittsburgh, for a project on "Understanding and False Theories."
AND ANOTHER: Another reader wondered why so few law professors seem to win these kinds of awards. My guess, based on what I know about law schools and having been an ACLS reviewer, is that very few actually apply for support because (1) the top law schools typically provide a term of research leave after every three years of teaching (sometimes less), which both creates eligibility problems for many fellowships, and also means that research leave is fairly frequent even without outside support; and (2) law salaries are sufficiently higher than the norm elsewhere in the academy (medicine excepted, of course) such that almost all existing fellowships are inadequate to make up the lost salary. Some universities (a small number) will make up the difference, but most do not. The combination of 1 and 2 explains, I suspect, the relative paucity of law faculty among the fellowship recipients (and notwithstanding the fairly large number of JD/PhDs at the top law schools these days). For what it is worth, I personally have never applied for any of these fellowships, and anecdotal conversational evidence suggests my reasons are not atypical.
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