The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) has announced the 2026 ACLS Fellows. As ACLS celebrates 100 years of grantmaking in 2026, the ACLS Fellowship Program stands as its longest-running program, recognizing outstanding scholarship in the humanities and social sciences.

Congratulations to Amna Qayyum, recipient of a 2026 ACLS Fellowship, for her project, "The War on Reproduction: Authoritarianism and the Global Politics of Family Planning in Pakistan".

Project abstract: “The War on Reproduction” traces how reproduction became central to the rise, expansion, and crisis of postcolonial authoritarianism in Pakistan. In the decades after the 1947 Partition, as East and West Pakistan navigated decolonization and Cold War geopolitics, Ayub Khan’s military regime cast population growth as the country’s “problem number one.” Working with a transnational network of experts and institutions, the regime built one of the world’s earliest, and most ambitious, population control programs, linking research and policy to clinics, contraceptives, publicity campaigns, and tens of thousands of family planning workers. These workers carried family planning into villages, mosques, and households, shaping reproductive practices through developmental and Islamic idioms of ethical childrearing, public welfare, and responsible citizenship. By 1971, Pakistan’s program was celebrated internationally, even as it deepened inequities between East and West Pakistan and became a flashpoint in the stormy downfall of Ayub’s regime. Centering the country as an active site of global knowledge-making, the project shows how Pakistani actors shaped the models, metrics, and moral vocabularies of reproductive governance across authoritarian contexts in the decolonizing world. In so doing, “The War on Reproduction” reveals how struggles over intimate life remain a key site for understanding state power today.

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 their founding in 1919.