LaGuardia English Professor Dr. Jesse W. Schwartz Receives 2025 ACLS Fellowship
LONG ISLAND CITY, NY (May 19, 2025) — English Professor and Director of the English Major at LaGuardia Community College/CUNY Dr Jesse W. Schwartz was recently 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.
After four years of restricting ACLS Fellowships to early-career scholars due to the impact of COVID-19, the 2024 competition was re-opened to scholars across all career stages. Dr. Schwartz 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. Awardees who are independent scholars, adjunct faculty, or have teaching-intensive roles receive an additional stipend between $3,000 and $6,000.
Dr. Schwartz’s research explores how Russia’s enduring otherness from the West played a significant role in the latter’s consolidation, thereby offering a useful cultural conundrum long before the Cold War hardened such distinctions into the “three-world” model. In particular, his project traces several intersections between political and racial formation by mapping the diffuse prehistories, ideological formalization, and transnational afterlives of the movement known as “Eurasianism,” which emerged in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution as a fungible theory of ethnos that attempted to explain Russia’s singular place in the world at the interstices of Europe and Asia.
“ACLS is grateful that we are in a position to continue to fund this vital research that advances our understanding of human societies and cultures,” said ACLS Vice President James Shulman. “Representing many different fields of study—including African diaspora studies, art history, English, gender studies, musicology, philosophy, religious studies, and more—this year’s fellows demonstrate the importance of foundational humanistic inquiry in helping us to understand a wide range of questions concerning our collective and varied histories, narratives, creations, and beliefs.”
The ACLS Fellowship Program is funded primarily by the ACLS endowment, which has benefited from the generous support of esteemed funders, institutional members, and individual donors since our founding in 1919.
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LaGuardia Community College (LAGCC), a Hispanic-Serving Institution, located in Long Island City, Queens offers more than 50 associate degrees and academic certificates, and more than 65 continuing education programs to prepare New Yorkers for transfer to senior colleges and rewarding jobs and careers. An institution of the City University of New York (CUNY), the College reflects the legacy of our namesake, Fiorello H. LaGuardia, the former NYC mayor beloved for his advocacy of the underserved. Since 1971, LaGuardia’s academic programs and support services have advanced the socioeconomic mobility of students from Queens, NYC and beyond.
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