PhD student Kale Serrato Doyen is a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation fellow

Kale Serrato Doyen, who is pursuing a PhD in history of art and architecture at the University of Pittsburgh Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences, has been awarded a 2024 Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship. The program supports doctoral students in the humanities and interpretive social sciences as they pursue bold and innovative approaches to dissertation research.

Doyen is one of 45 awardees, selected from a pool of more than 700 applicants through a rigorous, interdisciplinary peer review process. Doyen’s research explores Black geographies in Pittsburgh through the photographic archive of Charles “Teenie” Harris, a 20th-century studio photographer and photojournalist for The Pittsburgh Courier. In her dissertation, “Mapping the Teenie Harris Archive: Photography, Community and Pittsburgh’s Black Built Environment,” Doyen will collaborate with local communities to digitally map Harris’ photographs, providing a spatial context to long-standing histories of displacement, social inequality and Black life in Pittsburgh.

The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) launched the program in 2023 with the support of the Mellon Foundation to advance a vision for doctoral education that prioritizes openness to new methods and sources, underrepresented voices and perspectives and scholarly experimentation. The awards are designed to accelerate change in the norms of humanistic scholarship by recognizing those who take risks in the modes, methods and subjects of their research.

Each fellow receives an award of up to $50,000, consisting of a $40,000 stipend for the fellowship year; up to $8,000 for project-related research, training, professional development and travel expenses; and a $2,000 stipend to support external mentorship that offers new perspectives on the fellow’s project and expands their advising network. With fellows pursuing their research across the country and beyond, ACLS will also provide opportunities for virtual networking and scholarly programming throughout the fellows’ award terms.