Assistant Professor Michael Lavery Wins ACLS Fellowship

The Russian professor's project explores how Latin American fiction influenced and was reframed by Soviet culture

The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) has awarded a 2026 ACLS Fellowship to Michael Lavery, assistant professor of Russian in the School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures. The program is the organization’s longest running program and supports outstanding scholarship in the humanities and social sciences. 

Lavery is one of 63 scholars selected from a pool of over 2,000 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. Awardees who are independent scholars, adjunct faculty or have teaching-intensive roles receive an additional stipend between $3,000 and $6,000.

Lavery's project, "Translating the Blazing Continent: Latin American Fiction and Soviet World Literature,” uncovers how translations of Latin American fiction reshaped Soviet visions of socialist internationalism during the Cold War. Beginning in the 1960s, novels by such writers as Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar and Carlos Fuentes appeared in Russian translation, quickly becoming a fixture of late Soviet culture. Through archival research and analysis of translations, paratexts, literary criticism and interviews, this project reconstructs the negotiations among translators, critics and state officials over how to introduce Latin American writing to readers. The effort to integrate these works into the Soviet canon ultimately redefined the boundaries of socialist realism, articulating a broader postcolonial framework of world literature.

"We are proud to award ACLS Fellowships to 63 outstanding scholars across a range of fields,” said ACLS President Joy Connolly. “Deep understanding of humanity and human endeavor doesn’t come out of thin air: it rests on the work of generations of scholars who need time to do research and develop their arguments. We salute the new fellows’ contributions to knowledge and to society, and we celebrate their expertise and dedication.” 

"Receiving an ACLS Fellowship is a significant accomplishment and a wonderful recognition of the work Michael is doing to further our understanding of how cultures and literatures influence and change each other," said Mel Scullen, professor and director of the UMD School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures. "We are so fortunate to count him as one of our own."

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 the organization’s founding in 1919.