Debashree Mukherjee Awarded 2025 ACLS Fellowship

Awards Recognize Excellence in Humanities and Social Sciences Research

We are proud to announce that Debashree Mukherjee 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.

After four years of restricting ACLS Fellowships to early-career scholars due to the impact of COVID-19, the 2024 competition was re-opened to scholars across all career stages. Professor Mukherjee has been recognized as one of 62 outstanding scholars from a pool of over 2,300 applicants through a multi-stage peer review process.

Mukherjee’s research project, Tropical Machines, explores nineteenth-century media experiments in penal colonies and sugar islands such as the Andamans, Mauritius, and Fiji, to argue that the machines that are considered emblematic of Western modernity were in fact forged in the “dark” tropics.

“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 our founding in 1919.