Assistant Professor of English Steven Yao has been awarded an American Council on Learned Societies (ACLS) fellowship. The ACLS fellowship was awarded for Yao's project, Foreign Accents: From the Language of Race to the Poetics of Ethnicity in Chinese American Verse, 1910-Present. Yao says, "This study analyzes the range of rhetorical and formal strategies by which various Chinese American writers have sought to incorporate Chinese culture and especially language in constructing a cultural or ethnic subjectivity. Combining such analysis with extensive social contextualization, Foreign Accents thus delineates an historical poetics of Chinese American verse from its beginnings in the early 20th century to our contemporary moment."
The mission of the ACLS, as set forth in its constitution, is to "advance humanistic studies in all fields of learning in the humanities and the social sciences and to maintain and strengthen relations among the national societies devoted to such studies." As the pre-eminent representative of humanities scholarship in America, the ACLS carries out its mission in a variety of programs across many fields of learning. Awarding peer-reviewed fellowships is at the core of ACLS activity.
ACLS is perhaps best known as a funder of humanities research through fellowships and grants awarded to individuals and, on occasion, to groups and institutions. The centerpiece of this work is the ACLS Fellowship Program. ACLS Fellowships are designed to permit scholars holding the Ph.D. or equivalent to devote a full year to research and writing in such fields as literatures and languages, history, anthropology, political theory, philosophy, classics, religion, the history of art, linguistics, musicology, and the study of diverse world civilizations and cultures. Over the past 60 years more than 3,000 scholars have held ACLS Fellowships, several at early stages in their careers, including many leading figures in the humanities today. The intensive peer-review process that results in the selection of these fellows is not just an administrative mechanism: it is an opportunity for distinguished scholars to reach broad consensus on standards of quality in humanities research.
The American Council of Learned Societies was established in 1919 to represent the United States within the Union Académique Internationale (UAI) (International Union of Academies), which itself was established earlier that year "to encourage cooperation in the advancement of studies through collaborative research and publications in those branches of learning promoted by the Academies and institutions represented in the UAI—philology, archaeology, history, the moral, political and social sciences." At that time, no organization existed in the United States to perform this function. The ACLS has represented the nation in the UAI with distinction for more than 80 years.
Alongside this literary historical dimension, Yao wants to track developments in poetry against changes in the dominant U.S. legal and cultural approaches to characterizing the notion of "Chineseness," first by means of the discursive category of race, and subsequently through that of ethnicity. In doing so, he hopes to show how Chinese American verse variously articulates a "counter-poetics" of difference in response and challenge to hegemonic discourses about the terms of minority identity in the U.S.
During part of the tenure of the ACLS fellowship, Yao will also be external faculty fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center.
