The Promise of the Humanities at Community Colleges:

“ACLS is proud to have supported exceptional community college faculty across the country who produce valuable and innovative research in the humanities and social sciences. Because these faculty, as their name suggests, sustain communities directly and in distinctive ways, it is all the more important to us to celebrate their achievements. Their work broadens scholarly perspectives and maps new ways to make humanistic inquiry accessible to all areas of our society.”

 - Joy Connolly, President, American Council of Learned Societies

Community colleges have long attracted faculty members with advanced disciplinary training, a strong interest in teaching, and a commitment to equity and access. These teacher-scholars are a critical constituency in the landscape of higher education with an outsized impact relative to the support they receive. Community colleges serve some of the most underrepresented groups in American postsecondary education and teach over forty percent of all undergraduates in the United States. From the vantage point of 2025, the community college faculty fellowship program showcases the extensive research and subject matter expertise community college scholars have to share as well as the considerable experience in the study of teaching and learning that comes from their dedication to students and the many communities represented in their classrooms. Their expertise resonates far beyond the two-year-college sector, and opportunities like the Mellon/ACLS Community College Faculty Fellowship help to amplify and disseminate their knowledge as teacher-scholars to the larger ecosystem of higher education.

In 2016–17, ACLS held a series of meetings with community college leaders and faculty members to increase our knowledge of the community college landscape and solicit ideas for a new fellowship program tailored to the circumstances of faculty members teaching at two-year institutions. Through these conversations, we developed a program that prioritized flexibility, offering a base award of forty thousand dollars that could be used to cover a variety of costs, including salary replacement during the summer; course buyouts during the academic year; travel costs and registration fees for research and conferences; costs associated with organizing a conference, workshop, or event; fees related to publication or dissemination; stipends for undergraduate research assistants; or costs for course materials. The award term for the fellowships spanned up to eighteen months, allowing fellows to concentrate their work in a “traditional” research leave of a semester’s length, spread periodic course releases over multiple terms, or devote funds to research and project costs without any supported research leave.

This volume of essays is an effort to document the conditions that faculty members face at two-year colleges as they pursue their research agendas, incorporate their research into the classroom, and work with the communities that anchor their institutions. It is also a celebration of the effective approaches to research and teaching employed by these scholars to overcome barriers and capitalize on moments of opportunity. Two former reviewers for the program, and leaders in the two-year-college sector, served as coeditors for the volume: Carmen Carrasquillo, vice president of the academic senate and professor of English at San Diego Miramar College, and Brian Stipelman, associate vice president for academic affairs and dean of arts and humanities at Frederick Community College, were invaluable to this project. They collaborated to shape the framework for the anthology and worked one-on-one with the fellows throughout the writing and editing process. We are incredibly grateful for their generous dedication to this project.

Mellon/ACLS Community College Faculty Fellows represent a wide range of disciplines in the humanities and humanistic social sciences including anthropology, art history, ethnic studies, gender and women’s studies, history, political science, religious studies, sociology, and many others. Their projects are as far ranging as their disciplinary breadth: monographs and articles that are now (or soon to be) in print at a range of academic and popular presses, public exhibitions and digital humanities projects that preserve and amplify marginalized histories, collaborations with students and community partners that work to redress systemic inequities. This brief summary does not begin to capture the wide range of remarkable work funded by the program. We invite you to not only read the following essays from twelve of these fellows but also take a look at the full list of fellows and projects funded across the four years of the Mellon/ACLS Community College Faculty Fellowship program.

Three years after the last competition, we see the outsized effect that this fellowship can have on a scholar’s career and how it continues to enrich their classrooms and the many intersecting communities they serve. This impact drives ACLS’s commitment to supporting community college faculty members across our programs. In 2024 we launched the ACLS Community College Faculty Research Fellowship, a one-year pilot program offering community college scholars the opportunity to pursue their research in virtual, hybrid, or on-site residencies at three humanities research centers. In addition to offering direct support for research, the program will bring community college faculty members together with funders and the leadership of research centers and scholarly associations to advise on the development of more inclusive research infrastructure for scholars in teaching-intensive faculty roles.

The essays featured in this volume showcase the impactful work made possible when we support community college faculty members in their research ambitions. Via these scholarly, personal, and professional reflections, we can gain a fuller understanding about the teaching, service, and research conditions at community colleges.