Three faculty members from WashU along with one doctoral student, all affiliated with Arts & Sciences, have been awarded 2025 fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS).
Yannick Coenders, an assistant professor specializing in sociology, investigates the connections among race, urban environments, and colonial influences. The ACLS fellowship will facilitate his ongoing book endeavor, “Dispersal: Governing Against the Ghetto in Post-World War II Europe,” which analyzes how anxieties in the U.S. surrounding anti-Black sentiment regarding “the ghetto” became pivotal in urban racial governance across western Europe since the 1950s. Concentrating on Birmingham in England and Rotterdam in the Netherlands, “Dispersal” will follow the development of a new transnational dialogue concerning race and space that emerged in opposition to the residential concentration of nonwhite communities.
Qimeng Duan is pursuing a PhD in anthropology, focusing on archaeology. Her accolade, the Luce/ACLS Travel Grants in China Studies, will aid her project “Cultivating the Past: Lost Crops in Neolithic and Bronze-age China,” which studies the possible domestication methods of overlooked crops. Targeting Chenopodium album and Echinochloa crus-galli, Duan seeks to deepen the understanding of ancient agricultural practices and their potential to enhance sustainability in modern times.
Anya Plutynski, a philosophy professor, examines the history and philosophy surrounding biology and medicine. Her most recent book project, “Making Mental Health,” draws from her psychotherapy experience and training to investigate the rise of psychotherapy and how clinical practices influenced, and were influenced by, evolving theories and interpretations of “mental health” and “evidence-based” practice. Plutynski questions: What precisely is this concept known as “mental health”? Does psychotherapy foster it? And how can we ascertain this?
Sarah Weston, an assistant professor within the English department, explores 18th- and 19th-century literature and art, with specific emphasis on William Blake, Romanticism, and the evolution of scientific and mathematical thought. Her fellowship, the ACLS Morton N. Cohen and Richard N. Swift Fellowship, will support her project “The Cypher & The Abyss,” a cultural examination of zeros and ones — from the establishment of binary in 1679 by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz to Charles Babbage’s development of the Analytical Engine in the 1830s, which is widely regarded as the first computer.
Established in 1919, the ACLS stands as one of the foremost scholarly organizations in the nation, dedicated to the advancement and dissemination of humanistic knowledge. Fellowships are available to academics across all fields within the humanities and related social sciences. A total of 62 scholars were selected through peer review from an applicant pool exceeding 2,300 candidates. Discover more on the ACLS website.
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