History alumnus awarded ACLS Emerging Voices Fellowship

Felix Jean-Louis, an alumnus of the FIU Department of History, was recently named an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Emerging Voices Fellow, which helps fund scholars during the COVID-19 socioeconomic downturn.

During this time of financial and academic uncertainty, ACLS rolled out the Emerging Voices Fellowship to help amplify the voices of scholars affected by the pandemic. Both institutions and individuals are making difficult financial decisions that will ripple throughout academia.

The fellowship will allow recent Ph.D. grads in the humanities and related social sciences to take up one-year positions at select institutions in ACLS’s Research University Consortium, beginning in August and September of 2020. The program provides a $60,000 stipend plus benefits, as well as $5,000 in research/
professional development funding, childcare or eldercare costs, and access to ACLS professional development resources.

One of only 40 recipients, Jean-Louis is currently working at UNC Charlotte.

“I feel lucky I was chosen for this fellowship that was specifically crafted in terms of COVID-19,” said Jean-Louis, who began the fellowship in August. “Going into [the job market] before COVID-19, we knew that jobs were precarious.”

Jean-Louis' experience and expertise span various regions and cultures and are focused on internationalism. He was a fellow in the U.S. Department of Education’s inaugural Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship in 2014 with FIU's Kimberly Green Latin American and Caribbean Center. At FIU, he received his master’s in African and African Diaspora Studies and completed his doctoral thesis in 2014, titled “Between Harlem and Paris: Haitian Internationalism in the Interwar Period, 1919-1937.”

“I grew so much [at FIU],” said Jean-Louis. “The professors there really helped shape me from mere potential to the scholar I am today.”

Jean-Louis’ thesis highlighted the contributions of Haitians in mitigating the racial subjugation of people of African descent in the years between 1919 and 1937. In his dissertation, Jean-Louis argued that these Haitians were key participants in the effort to boost Pan-African solidarity and promote anti-colonialism in the United States and abroad.