Ferguson Wins Prestigious ACLS Fellowship

The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) has awarded Stephen C. Ferguson II a prestigious ACLS Fellowship for the 2025-26 school year. Ferguson is currently Associate Professor of Philosophy and of Africana Studies, but will assume the rank of Professor effective July 2025.

The longest running program at the organization, ACLS Fellowships support outstanding scholarship in the humanities and social sciences. This year, the program plans to award more than $3.5 million to 62 scholars selected from a pool of over 2,300 applicants through a multi-stage peer review process.

The fellowship will allow Ferguson to complete a book manuscript tentatively titled On the Black Side of Philosophy: Black Philosophers Confront Black Power and Communism. The book aims to highlight the overlooked contributions of Black philosophers—both academic and non-academic—during and after the Black Power Era of the 1960s and 1970s, a period marked by the radical reimagining of Black identity, nationalism, and liberation. These philosophers include Eugene C. Holmes, William R. Jones, Adrian Piper, Charles Johnson, Cornel West, Charles Mills, Walter Rodney, Cedric Robinson, and John H. McClendon, all of whom have grappled with the interwoven dynamics of racism, national oppression, class exploitation, and the contested relevance of Marxism. But the project is not just historical, as it also contributes to contemporary debates about racism, democracy, and social change. In the process, it seeks to challenge dominant paradigms and to foreground Black philosophy as a vital site of critical theory and political imagination.

Born in Topeka and raised in Kansas City, Ferguson earned bachelor’s degrees in philosophy and history at the University of Missouri-Columbia, followed by a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Kansas in 2004. He taught at Auburn University and for many years at North Carolina A&T State University before joining NC State in 2017. He is the author of Philosophy of African American Studies: Nothing Left of Blackness (Palgrave, 2015) and The Paralysis of Analysis in African American Studies: Corporate Capitalism and Black Popular Culture (Bloomsbury, 2023) and the co-author (with John H. McClendon) of Beyond the White Shadow: Philosophy, Sports and the African American Experience (Kendall-Hunt, 2012) and African American Philosophers and Philosophy: An Introduction to the History, Concepts and Contemporary Issues (Bloomsbury, 2019). He has also published more than twenty journal articles and book chapters.