Max Jefferson Awarded 2025 Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship
Awards Support 45 Early-Career Doctoral Students Pursuing Innovative Dissertation Research
The Department of Music is proud to announce thatMax Jefferson has been awarded a 2025 Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship
The Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship Program supports 45 doctoral students in the humanities and social sciences as they pursue innovative approaches to dissertation research, including new methodologies, formats, and collaborations with community partners beyond the academy. ACLS launched the program in 2023 to advance change in humanistic scholarship by recognizing emerging scholars who take risks in the modes, methods, and subjects of their research.
Jefferson’s research explores Black Nationalist Music limiting its purview exclusively to the United States and to one cultural formation of Black nationalism that coalesced in New York City with a collective move to Harlem in 1965. No longer in the racially heterogeneous milieu of downtown music making, the cohort of what “Sound as Black Situation” terms Black Nationalist Music built a space in which their Blackness was prerequisite. This project recovers the distinct Black musical practice of this cohort and its co-constitutive Black music criticism, parsing Black Nationalist Music from its scholarly and broader generic classification as “experimental jazz.” The method of this recovery explores the spatial and ideological transition uptown and the synthesis of a Black tradition foundational to pursuant social, political, and mythic Black world-building in the United States.
“ACLS is proud to support these fellows, who are poised to conduct groundbreaking dissertation research and broaden the audience for humanistic scholarship,” said Alison Chang, ACLS Program Officer in US Programs. “Their innovative projects not only produce new avenues of knowledge but also inspire the evolution of doctoral education across the humanities and social sciences.”
Jefferson has been recognized as one of45 awardees, selected from a pool of nearly 900 applicants through a rigorous, multi-stage peer review process that drew on the expertise of more than 150 scholars across the country. Each fellow receives an award of up to $52,000, consisting of a $42,000 stipend; up to $8,000 for project-related research, training, professional development, and travel; and a $2,000 stipend to support external mentorship that offers new perspectives on the fellow’s project and expands their advising network.
Once again, congratulations Max!