Assistant Professor of Musicology Gabrielle Cornish has been awarded a 2025 ACLS Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). The longest running program at the organization, ACLS Fellowships support outstanding scholarship in the humanities and social sciences.

After four years of restricting ACLS Fellowships to early-career scholars due to the impact of COVID-19, the 2024 competition was re-opened to scholars across all career stages. Cornishhas been recognized as one of 62 outstanding scholars from a pool of over 2,300 applicants through a multi-stage peer review process.

ACLS Fellowships provide up to $60,000 to support scholars for six to 12 months of full-time research and writing. Awardees who are independent scholars, adjunct faculty, or have teaching-intensive roles receive an additional stipend between $3,000 and $6,000.

Cornish’s research explores how music and sound helped to construct Soviet identity during the Cold War. Using archival research, musical analysis, historical sound studies, and interviews, it argues that the Soviet government strategically considered sound and music within a broader politics of socialist modernity—that is, a socialist alternative to capitalist models of cultural and technological development.

“Ultimately, this project presents a model for rethinking aesthetic modernism in the late socialist context and, in doing so, reintroduces the Soviet Union into broader discourses of musical modernism, invention, and the ‘new’ in twentieth-century music history,” Cornish writes in the project abstract.

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 our founding in 1919.