2025 American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship.

The School of Art History is pleased to announce that Dr Ruth Ezra 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. Ezra has 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.

Ezra’s research explores "Leaves of Glass: Mica between art and science in early modernity." Best thought of as the plastic of its time, the foliaceous mineral mica or “Muscovy glass” assumed a remarkable salience across the intellectual, material, and visual cultures of early modernity. Transparent leaves lent ersatz windows to hand-held fans and embroidered caskets while also providing heat-resistant panes for lanterns and see-through covers for natural history collections. “Leaves of Glass” tells the story of mica’s extraction and circulation in northern Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The book considers how mica’s distinct physical properties fed the imaginations of poets, painters, needleworkers, and natural philosophers alike. It offers one chapter in a longer history of transparency as both matter and metaphor in art and science.

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.