UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Dara Walker, assistant professor of African American studies, history, and women's, gender, and sexuality studies, has received a 2025 American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Fellowship.
Walker is among 62 scholars from a pool of more than 2,300 to receive a fellowship, which supports outstanding scholarship in the humanities and social sciences and is geared specifically to early-career scholars.
Scholars receive up to $60,000 for six to 12 months of full-time research and writing through ACLS, a nonprofit federation made up of 81 scholarly organizations. The fellowship program is funded primarily by the ACLS endowment, which has been in place since the organization’s founding in 1919.
“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.”
Walker’s fellowship will go toward her current book project, “High School Rebels: Black Power, Education, and Youth Politics in the Motor City, 1966–1972,” which tells the story of a citywide movement of Detroit teenagers who fought for Black self-determination during the Black Power Era.
“I am beyond thrilled to receive support from ACLS at such a critical moment in the writing process,” Walker said. “Having the time to engage with other humanists and scholars in the interpretive social sciences — including sociologists, political scientists and education scholars — as I finalize this project really is a gift.”
“High School Rebels” uses students’ political writings, the records of municipal institutions, the archival materials of urban coalitions and oral history interviews with 40 youth activists to trace the evolution of both the ideas about and the role of Black high school students as movement thinkers and actors. It also examines how race and age worked in tandem in the fight for resources in postwar urban environments.
“The book is an effort to sharpen our understanding of a history that remains with us — a history of young people who imagined a world of possibilities and who fought to actualize their visions within their schools and in community institutions,” Walker said. “Studying Black youth’s stories in Detroit against the backdrop of deindustrialization, urban renewal projects and urban rebellions demystifies cities as laboratories of social change and sites of political education for Black youth. My hope is that this work helps to clarify how and where we see young people in the past and in the present negotiating shifts in technology, politics and education through their active engagement with the institutions that shape their daily lives.”
Walker, who received her doctorate from Rutgers University, focuses her research and teaching on African American history, the history of children and youth, urban history, 20th century U.S. history, and public history.
In addition to the ACLS fellowship, Walker’s research has been funded by the Ford Foundation's Dissertation Fellowship, the National Academy of Education and the Spencer Foundation’s Postdoctoral Fellowship, the Walter P. Reuther Library's Albert Shanker Fellowship for Research in Education, and Rutgers, as well as through internal grants and fellowships from Penn State’s Richards Civil War Era Center, McCourtney Institute for Democracy, Humanities Institute, and the Consortium on Social Movements and Education Research and Practice.
Walker has presented her research at several national and international conferences, including the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH), the American Historical Association (AHA), the Society for the History of Children and Youth (SHCY), the Urban History Association, and the National Council for Black Studies (NCBS). Her work has been published in several journals, including The Black Scholar, Feminist Studies, The Journal of Urban History, and The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, in addition to her online publications for Black Perspectives.