Alan Goldman and Melvin Patrick Ely, both William R. Kenan Jr. Professors of Humanities, will use the fellowships to conduct research and produce major pieces of scholarly work during the 2007-08 academic year.

Goldman, who specializes in epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, and philosophy of law, will use the award to write a book on practical reason.

“The thesis of the book is that all the reasons we have derive from our subjective concerns and motivations instead of from external objective values, as many other philosophers maintain,” he said.

Ely, who writes and teaches about the history of African Americans and of the South, will use the award to work on his next book, A Horrible Intimacy: Whites and Enslaved Blacks in Old Virginia.

"Finding time to conduct intensive research and writing is one of the welcome challenges of working at William and Mary, where we faculty devote so much of our time to our students,” Ely said. “The ACLS Fellowship will give me an opportunity to work on my book--and to look forward to my reunion with my students next fall."

The American Council of Learned Societies is a private non-profit federation of sixty-nine national scholarly organizations that seeks to advance studies in all fields of learning in the humanities and the social sciences. ACLS offers fellowships and grants in over one dozen programs, for research in the humanities and humanistic social sciences at the doctoral and postdoctoral levels. This year, ACLS awarded fellowships totaling $8,382,491 to 232 scholars.