(From left) Cecilia Márquez, Mélanie Lamotte and Yun Emily Wang have been named 2026 American Council of Learned Societies fellows.
Three Duke Faculty Awarded ACLS Fellowships
Three Duke University faculty have been named 2026 American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS)’s fellows: Mélanie Lamotte, assistant professor of History; Cecilia Márquez, the Hunt Family Assistant Professor of History and Yun Emily Wang, assistant professor of Music.
Lamotte, Márquez and Wang are joined by 62 fellows representing a wide range of institutions, disciplines and career stages, including many early-career and non-tenure-track scholars. Each fellowship provides up to $60,000 for six to 12 months of full-time research and writing, with additional stipends for independent scholars and those in teaching-intensive roles. In total, the ACLS awarded more than $3.5 million to support research in the humanities and social sciences.
With projects spanning centuries, as well as the globe, Duke’s three 2026 fellows exemplify ACLS’s longstanding commitment to advancing humanistic knowledge across time and place.
Mélanie Lamotte
Assistant Professor of History
“Worlds of the Enslaved: A Transoceanic Story of Family, Community, and Economy in the French Empire”
“Worlds of the Enslaved” offers the most geographically expansive account to date of enslaved life in the French empire, spanning Louisiana, Guadeloupe, Senegambia, Isle Bourbon and India. Drawing on court testimonies, travel narratives, official records, maps, archaeology and museum collections, Lamotte reconstructs everyday life in captivity through a history-from-below approach.
Rather than reducing all enslaved people’s actions to resistance, the book analyzes the circumstances that enabled the formation of families, communities and enslaved economies. By extending the frame beyond the Americas, the book shows how culture, labor and environment shaped enslaved life across the French world, while reshaping understandings of slavery. A digital companion maps slave ship voyages across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans and documents conditions aboard.
“I am deeply honored to receive this award at a pivotal moment in my research. It supports a project rooted in a long-standing personal ambition to study my own Caribbean family history since enslavement. I hope this project will honor the generations that preceded me.”
Cecilia Márquez
Hunt Family Assistant Professor of History
“Latinos and the Right: Race and Radicalization in US Politics, 1970-Present”
“Latinos and the Right” examines the history of Latino conservative and right-wing activism in the United States, from the GOP’s political realignment in the late 1960s through the U.S. Capitol attack on January 6, 2021. The project highlights the diversity of Latino right-wing thought, tracing its connections to ideologies such as anti-communism, free-market advocacy, opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage, anti-Black racism, anti-immigrant sentiment, conspiracism and antisemitism. Centering the voices of Latino leaders and ideologues, the project reframes the history of American conservatism from the rise of the New Right to Trumpism, providing historical context for understanding contemporary right-wing movements within Latino communities in the United States.
“This project really started in earnest two years ago, through the History+ program, Latinx History and Conservatism, with a group of undergraduates spending the summer working with me on archival research related to this topic. For too long the story of right-wing politics has treated nonwhite participants as anomalies or ‘traitors’ to their race. This fellowship will give me the opportunity to spend time in archives, collect oral histories and work on my next book project, which examines the history of Latino right-wing politics in the United States from the 1960s to 2020.”
Yun Emily Wang
Assistant Professor of Music
“Sonic Poetics of Disordered Miscellany: Wet Market “Hot Noise” in Post-Authoritarian Taiwan”
This project explores how the everyday “hot noise” of Taiwan’s wet markets produces competing political visions of democratization. Serving as a shifting metaphor of the country’s geopolitical negotiations with Japan, China and the United States, the wet market’s distinctive soundscape has marked aural imaginations of the popular since the 1930s.
The project brings together a sonic ethnography of hawkers, shoppers, tourists and city officials with a vernacular history drawn from songbooks, popular music and amateur recordings. Examining how these layered sound-worlds shape perceptions of the market as the “charming chaos” often associated with Taiwan, the project considers how national imaginaries are formed, challenged and reshaped through everyday sensory experience.
“This project expands on my first book, which was on how the minutiae of sound and everyday life shape minoritized people’s ways of being in the world, while exploring how we navigate multiple conflicting realities by listening. I am equally grateful for ACLS’s support and for the stimulating intellectual community across Duke, and I am so excited to carry out the research during my fellowship year!"
