The Department of French & Italian Studies is proud to announce that Assistant Professor of French Hannah Frydman has been awarded a 2023 ACLS Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). The ACLS Fellowship Program supports exceptional scholarship in the humanities and interpretive social sciences that has the potential to make significant contributions within and beyond the awardees’ fields.
Frydman has been recognized as one of 60 early-career scholars selected through a multi-stage peer review from a pool of nearly 1,200 applicants. ACLS Fellowships provide between $30,000 and $60,000 to support scholars during six to 12 months of sustained research and writing. Awardees who do not hold tenure-track faculty appointments – half of the 2023 cohort – also receive an additional $7,500 stipend for research or other personal costs incurred during their award term.
Frydman’s project, “Between the Sheets: Classified Advertising, Sexuality, and the Moral Threat to Press Freedom in France,” explores how, at the turn of the twentieth century, the Parisian classifieds were peopled by a diverse range of actors, including sex workers, queer people, adulterers, and abortionists. This posed thorny questions for the French Third Republican project (1870–1940), with its commitments to both economic and press freedom and (sexual) morality and natality. "Between the Sheets" reframes the history of French republicanism and its freedoms through the terse and easily overlooked and thus previously understudied classified ad. It shows how freedom of the press and the publicity of the mass press’s back pages opened up possibilities for living non-normative lives in private, which in turn inspired state and social efforts to exercise close control over both non-normative bodies and new media in the name of republican morality, with lasting effects on French law regarding gender and the family.
“With higher education under sustained attack around the country, ACLS is proud to support this diverse cohort of emerging scholars as they work to increase understanding of our connected human histories, cultures, and experiences,” said ACLS President Joy Connolly. “ACLS Fellowships are investments in an inclusive future where scholars are free to pursue rigorous, unflinching humanistic research.”
Stay updated with information about this and other ACLS fellowship and grant competitions.