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Three professors named American Council of Learned Societies fellows

By Public Affairs

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As 2017 fellows of the American Council of Learned Societies, three UC Berkeley faculty members will receive support for writing and research in the months ahead. (iStock image)

As 2017 fellows of the American Council of Learned Societies, three UC Berkeley faculty members will receive support for writing and research in the months ahead. (iStock image)

Three faculty members at the University of California, Berkeley, have been chosen as 2017 fellows of the American Council of Learned Societies, a private, nonprofit federation of 74 national scholarly organizations and the preeminent representative of American scholarship in the humanities and related social sciences.

Among the 71 scholars selected as ACLS fellows are Brian DeLay, a UC Berkeley associate professor of history; Samera Esmeir, an associate professor of rhetoric; and Tania Lombrozo, an associate professor of psychology and philosophy.

DeLay is an authority on the American West, United States-Mexico borderlands, the international arms trade and Native American history. He is the author of War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.-Mexican War. He is working on a book called Shoot the State: Guns, Freedom, and Domination in the Americas.

Esmeir’s work focuses on law and politics, Middle Eastern history and colonial and post-colonial studies. She is working on a book project looking at the intersection between revolutions and legal traditions, including international law, since the 18th century. Esmeir is the author of the 2012 book Juridical Humanity: A Colonial History.

Lombrozo works in the fields of cognitive psychology of explanation and understanding, concepts and moral reasoning. She is a regular contributor to the National Public Radio blog, 13.7: Cosmos & Culture. Her submissions are archived here.

The three will each receive stipends of $50,000 to support full-time research and writing for six months to a year.

In announcing the selections, the ACLS noted the fellows come from more than 50 colleges and universities and represent an array of humanities disciplines and methodologies. They were selected from a field of almost 1,200 applicants.

“The awardees were selected for their potential to bring new understandings of the human experience and creativity, from antiquity to the present, in contexts across the globe,” said Matthew Goldfeder, the council’s director of fellowship programs. “We are grateful to be able to support the intellectual vitality and rigor of humanistic inquiry at this challenging moment.”