Gian Duri Rominger Awarded 2026 ACLS Fellowship
UW Textual Studies is proud to announce that Dr. Gian Duri Rominger, TXTDS faculty and Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian Languages and Literature, has been selected by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) as a 2026 ACLS Fellowship recipient. Below, we showcase Dr. Rominger’s work, detail the history and focus of the ACLS Fellowship, and celebrate this fantastic accomplishment!
ACLS Fellowship Program
The ACLS Fellowship Program is the American Council of Learned Society’s longest running program. It recognizes excellence in humanities and social sciences research on topics covering any periodization, world region, or humanistic methodology. Supporting outstanding scholarship, the program aims to select fellows who represent the variety of humanistic scholarship across all fields of study. It 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.
Researching Sound in Language Use in Ancient Chinese Texts
Dr. Rominger’s research project, Aurality and the Search for Sound and Meaning in Early Chinese Texts, explores how sound in language use — especially patterns like rhyme and wordplay — shaped meaning in ancient Chinese argumentative writings that stand at the beginning of Chinese philosophy, specifically in texts from the Warring States period to the Han dynasty (ca. third century BCE–first century CE).
While these texts are studied primarily as philosophical treatises, this project shows that their literary form was just as important as their content. Challenging the idea that philosophy and literature are separate, this project shows that early Chinese texts often blur these boundaries.
It combines philological close readings that draw on recent historical reconstructions of Old Chinese phonology with a custom-built computational tool for detecting recurrent sound patterns across a large corpus of transmitted and excavated texts. Moreover, it argues that early Chinese thinkers used sound-based techniques not just for style or memorization, but to build arguments, coordinate textual units, and express complex ideas.
Dr. Rominger 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.
“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.”
Join us in congratulating Dr. Rominger on this incredible accomplishment!
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