Four Division of the Humanities scholars received American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) research and teaching fellowships for the 2014-15 academic year. The fellowships were awarded to Robert Bird, Steven Collins, Paul Copp, and Andrew Cashner.

Robert Bird, Associate Professor of Slavic Language and Literature and Cinema and Media Studies, will use his fellowship to focus on aesthetic practices within the USSR. In The Stalin Consensus: Aesthetics in an Age of Terror, Bird argues that Soviet cultural authorities relied on artists and critics to produce socialist realism.

Steven Collins, Chester D. Tripp Professor of South Asian Languages and Civilizations, will serve as a visiting professor at Arizona State University through the ACLS/Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Program in Buddhist Studies. 

As a postdoctoral fellow through the Henry Luce Foundation/ACLS Program in China Studies, Paul Copp, Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, will study manuscripts from a key medieval Chinese site on the eastern Silk Road to identify styles of Buddhist practice in the 9^th and 10^th century as a part of his Seal and Scroll: Vernacular Buddhism and Manuscript Culture at Dunhuang project. 

Music doctoral candidate Andrew Cashner will use the Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship to finish Faith, Hearing, and the Power of Music in Hispanic Villancicos, 1600-1700, a study of how villancicos, a musical genre, can be a source for understanding early modern Catholicism.