We are proud to announce that april l. graham-jackson, Geography PhD alum (2024) has been awarded a 2025 ACLS Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). The longest running program at the organization, ACLS Fellowships support outstanding scholarship in the humanities and social sciences.
graham-jackson has been recognized as one of 62 outstanding scholars from a pool of over 2,300 applicants through a multi-stage peer review process. ACLS Fellowships provide up to $60,000 to support scholars for six to 12 months of full-time research and writing.
graham-jackson's project, “Black Life Beyond The City,” is an epistemological critique of the origins of the urban question and how Black life, migration, and settlement are theorized through Chicago as the definitive model of urban-regional space developed by the Chicago School of Sociology. Through a historical and geographic analysis of Black suburbanization, this interdisciplinary and multi-sited project explores Black suburban placemaking and the spatial imaginaries of Black people who built suburban settlements in the post-Reconstruction, from 1877 to 1915, and post-Civil Rights eras, from 1965 to 2008, in Chicago Southland—a suburban sub-region of the Chicago metropolitan area.
Congrats, april!