Cassius Adair, Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication, has been awarded the prestigious American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Fellowship for 2021. Adair’s book project is titled “The Transgender Internet” and seeks to connect transgender theory and computer history.
The ACLS Fellowship Program awards fellowships to individual scholars working in the humanities and related social sciences. The program awarded 60 fellowships in 2020-21 totaling nearly $3.6 million. Recipients were selected from nearly 1,300 applicants through a multi-stage peer review process. The program aims to select recipients “who are broadly representative of the variety of humanistic scholarship across all fields of study.” Read more about the program and see a complete list of the 2020-21 Fellows on the ACLS website.
The construction and emergence of pseudonymous digital communities helped to facilitate new forms of trans activism but it also marked a turn towards a predominantly white and professionalized transgender politics during this period.
Adair is a writer, researcher, and lead producer of the podcast, Transcripts. He is a co-author of the experimental scholarly book Technoprecarious (MIT, 2020). And he has worked as a script editor for literary and media projects including New York Times bestseller The Vanishing Half, award-winning audio documentary “Not This Again” for KCRW’s Bodies podcast, and StoryCorps’ Peabody-nominated “Stonewall Outloud” podcast series.