ASU history professor selected for 2025 American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship
Maurice Crandall will spend a year working on his upcoming book project, which examines the roles of U.S. Army Indian Scouts in their communities
Maurice Crandall, associate professor of history at the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies, has been awarded a 2025 Fellowship with the American Council of Learned Societies. These fellowships support outstanding scholars in the humanities and social sciences.
Crandall is one of 62 ACLS Fellows for 2025, selected from a pool of more than 2,300 applicants. Each scholar will receive up to $60,000 to support 6–12 months of full-time researching and writing.
“I’m honored to receive an ACLS Fellowship,” Crandall said. “The most valuable benefit of the fellowship is the time it will give me to finish my book. I've been working on it for a few years now, and this will really help me bring it to completion."
His project is titled “Tiger of the Human Species: Yavapi-Apache Scouts and the Worlds They Made.” It will explore the roles that Dilzhe'e Apaches and Yavapais, who served as U.S. Army Indian Scouts, played in their communities. Crandall’s work focuses particular attention on how these men, as experienced border-crossers and cultural intermediaries, leveraged the experience and knowledge they gained as scouts to serve their communities after the so-called Indian Wars had concluded, from the 1890s to the 1930s. This will be the first-book length project on Indian Scouts after the Indian Wars, and the first by an Indigenous historian.
“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 James Shulman, ACLS vice president. “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 its founding in 1919.