As a fellow, Houghteling will be working on a book project that explores fleeting textile dyes that were shared across South Asia and the Indonesian archipelago in order to reconstitute an alternative framework for thinking about time and the durability of fabric and other resources from the natural world.
From the ACLS website:
"The long-distance colonial trade with Europe of the early modern period fixated on stabilization. This book introduces practices that placed a high value on materials that were seasonal and biodegradable, and that saw merit in renewing a faded cloth by re-dyeing it. The lost colors of textiles are part of the memory of a cloth and point to cultural connections, plant ecologies, and artisanal practices that rarely surface otherwise."
This year, the ACLS fellowship program will award more than $3.5 million to 63 scholars who are poised to make original and significant contributions to their field. The awardees were selected from a pool of over 2,000 applicants through a multi-stage peer review process and represent a broad range of institutions, fields, and career stages. Over half of the 2026 ACLS Fellows are early-career scholars and scholars who do not hold tenure-track faculty appointments.
