2025 Mellon Emerging Faculty Leaders Named

The Institute for Citizens & Scholars has named 10 scholars as Mellon Emerging Faculty Leaders (MEFL) for 2025. Funded by the Mellon Foundation, the MEFL Awards support junior faculty whose research focuses on contemporary history, politics, culture, and society, and who are committed to the creation of thriving campus communities for students and faculty.

The MEFL Award seeks to free the time of junior faculty working toward tenure so that they can both engage in and build support systems, professional networks, and scholarly groups that make their academic fields and campuses thrive. Each recipient receives a 12-month stipend of $20,000 while working toward tenure.

The exceptional early-career professors in this year’s class work in fields such as English, history, and anthropology. Awardees’ scholarship focuses on critical issues such as citizenship, natural resource management, and community building. In addition to pioneering research, they also take on additional campus responsibilities like mentoring, serving on advisory councils, working with student scholars, and giving additional talks and lectures. (See the full list of Fellows below.)

The 2025 class comes from a competitive applicant pool representing disciplines across the humanities. The final MEFL awardees were selected through an interview process by a selection committee of four former and current university leaders with various academic and research backgrounds.

Established in 2015, the program has now supported more than 80 junior faculty who represent the next generation of leaders and scholars in the humanities and social sciences and who are poised to play a significant role in shaping American higher education. Through their own work to make their fields and institutions reflective of our democracy, they are expanding young people’s understandings and frameworks for active roles in civil society.

For more information about the MEFL Award, eligibility requirements, and the next application cycle, visit https://citizensandscholars.org/fellowships/mefl/

Karen Bailey, University of Colorado at Boulder | Environmental Studies
Equity and Justice in Conservation and Natural Resource Management

Charisse Burden-Stelly (Dr. CBS), Wayne State University | African American Studies
Mutual Comradeship: Radical Blackness and the Praxis of Solidarity

Charlene J. Fletcher, Butler University | History, Anthropology, and Classics
Down in the Delta: Race Relations Between African & Italian Americans in the Mississippi Delta, 1880-1950

Óscar F. Gil-García, University at Buffalo, State University of New York | Anthropology
Legacies of Forced Migration

Teresa Hernández, Williamette University | Department of English
Endangered Border Subjects: Eco-Nationalism and The Crisis of Citizenship

Geoffrey Levin, Emory University | Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies
The Other Part of Us: American Jews and Middle Eastern Jewish Dilemmas, 1941-1979

Yuridia Ramírez, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign | Department of History
Indigeneity on the Move: Transborder Politics from Michoacán to North Carolina

Annette M. Rodriguez, University of Texas at Austin | History
Intimate Acquisitions: A Relational History of U.S. Bounty Lands

Dialika Sall, Lehman College – CUNY | Sociology
Connecting Black: Second-Generation Africans in America

Althea Rani Sircar, University of Redlands | Political Science
Affective Political Community in Unlivable Times