Awards Recognize Excellence in Humanities and Social Sciences Research
UC Santa Cruz is proud to announce that Professor Stacy Kamehiro has been awarded a 2025 ACLS Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). The longest running program at the organization, ACLS Fellowships support outstanding scholarship in the humanities and social sciences. Professor Stacy Kamehiro has been recognized as one of 62 outstanding scholars from a pool of over 2,300 applicants through a multi-stage peer review process.
ACLS Fellowships provide up to $60,000 to support scholars for six to 12 months of full-time research and writing. Awardees who are independent scholars, adjunct faculty, or have teaching-intensive roles receive an additional stipend between $3,000 and $6,000.
Professor Kamehiro’s book project, grounded in extensive archival research, narrows a significant gap in scholarship addressing the self-representations of Indigenous “others” at world fairs. It offers the first comprehensive analysis of exhibitions organized by political and social leaders of Hawaiʻi in the latter half of the nineteenth century, a time when the Hawaiian Kingdom faced acute colonial threats to its sovereignty. Shifts in exhibition form and content during this period reflected and shaped political aspirations and power dynamics among participants within Hawaiʻi and impacted international viewers’ perceptions of the Hawaiian nation. Professor Kamehiro’s research highlights Indigenous voices, focusing not only their resistance but their transformative role in world creation.
“ACLS is grateful that we are in a position to continue to fund this vital research that advances our understanding of human societies and cultures,” said ACLS Vice President James Shulman. “Representing many different fields of study—including African diaspora studies, art history, English, gender studies, musicology, philosophy, religious studies, and more—this year’s fellows demonstrate the importance of foundational humanistic inquiry in helping us to understand a wide range of questions concerning our collective and varied histories, narratives, creations, and beliefs.”
The ACLS Fellowship Program is funded primarily by the ACLS endowment, which has benefited from the generous support of esteemed funders, institutional members, and individual donors since their founding in 1919.
Congratulations, Stacy!