Palmer earns ACLS Fellowship

University of Georgia faculty member Jennifer Palmer has been named a 2020 recipient of an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship. The ACLS Fellowship program honors scholarship in the humanities and humanistic social sciences with the potential to make significant contributions to knowledge in their fields. The awards range from $40,000 to $75,000 and support six to 12 months of full-time research and writing.

Palmer, associate professor of history, is a historian of Early Modern Europe and the Atlantic and coordinator for the History and Gender Workshop. Her first book, Intimate Bonds: Family and Slavery in the French Atlantic, follows the stories of people who built families and fortunes on both sides of the French Atlantic.  By focusing on family and household, the units that anchored France in the eighteenth century, the book shows interconnections among race, gender, colonialism, and the plantation system in the early modern period.

“I am thrilled to accept this prestigious nation-wide research fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies,” Palmer said. “This fellowship will allow me to work full time on my monograph, Possession: Gender, Race, and Ownership in Eighteenth-Century Atlantic France. This book examines the property-owning practices of free women of color and white women in France and the French Caribbean, and shows how the rise of slavery and the plantation system caused opportunities for women to own property to disappear.”

This year, ACLS Fellowships totaling $4.3 million will be distributed among 81 awardees selected from nearly 1,200 applicants through a multi-stage peer review process. The supported projects represent a wide array of vital and timely areas of research including explorations of the lasting legacies of slavery in the West, the dynamics of migration and displacement in communities around the world, and the human dimensions of environmental decline and natural disasters, as well as bold new theories on gender and sexuality and the concept of well-being.

“Over the course of the fellowship I will conduct some final research in New Orleans, thanks to the support of a Faculty Research Grant in the Humanities and Arts,” Palmer said. “I am really looking forward to immersing myself in my writing.”