2 Dietrich School faculty earned ACLS Fellowships

Two University of Pittsburgh faculty members in the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences received American Counsel of Learned Societies (ACLS) Fellowships to conduct a full-time research project over the 2024-25 academic year.

Because of the disproportionate effect the COVID-19 pandemic has had on emerging, independent and untenured scholars, all of this year’s 60 fellows have earned their PhD in the past eight years and are scholars without faculty appointments or those off the tenure track.

Dela Kuma, assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology, will use the fellowship year to complete her project, “Africanized Tastes and Consumer Power,” an ethnoarchaeological history of how local tastes and consumer practices have impacted regional and global trade networks in West Africa over the last 200 years. A specialist in the archaeology of global encounters in Atlantic-era West Africa, she has also worked on archaeological projects in Nigeria, Portugal, Italy, Israel and Russia.

Kaliane Ung is a visiting assistant professor of French. Her project, “Wounded Writings: Disability in France,” focuses on first-person accounts of disability across literary genres. She studied at the University of Edinburgh and University of Paris before earning her PhD in French literature at New York University.