The mission of the American Council of Learned Societies is "the advancement of humanistic studies in all fields of learning in the humanities and the social sciences and the maintenance and strengthening of relations among the national societies devoted to such studies." ACLS, a private, nonprofit federation of seventy national scholarly organizations, is the preeminent representative of American scholarship in the humanities and related social sciences.
ACLS carries out its mission through a variety of programs across many fields of learning. Awarding peer-reviewed fellowships is central to our work. Peer review (see FAQ) promotes academic self-governance and establishes standards of scholarship, two goals that help define our endeavors and those of our societies. Other ACLS activities are convening and supporting scholarly conferences, sponsoring reference works and innovations in scholarly communication, strengthening relations among learned societies, encouraging the establishment of new societies, and representing humanistic scholarship in the U.S. and internationally.