Patrick Das Wins 2025 Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship

Our own Patrick Das is one of two CU Boulder PhD students to be awarded a 2025 Mellon/American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Dissertation Innovation Fellowship!

Just 45 PhD students from across the country were awarded the prestigious fellowship, in recognition of their innovative approaches to their dissertation research in the humanities or social sciences.

The fellowships, made possible by a grant from the Mellon Foundation, recognize doctoral students “who show promise of leading their fields in important new directions,” according to the ACLS. “The fellowships are designed to intervene at the formative stage of dissertation development, before writing is advanced, and provide time and support for emerging scholars’ innovative approaches to dissertation research—practical, trans- or interdisciplinary, collaborative, critical or methodological.

Das is researching how geography and multilingualism shape language change in Tikhir, an endangered language of eastern Nagaland, India, near the border with Myanmar. Through spatial analysis, the project maps patterns of interaction between Tikhir and neighboring indigenous languages. Das’ findings offer new insights into how small languages evolve within complex multilingual ecologies.

You can read more about CU's awardees here: https://www.colorado.edu/asmagazine/2025/05/05/cu-boulder-scholars-recognized-innovation-phd-research

Congratulations, Patrick!