The Founders’ Fellowship was endowed by trustees of the National Humanities Center and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in 2013 and has been awarded annually since to scholars from several disciplines, including indigenous, African American, and queer studies. The fellowship honors the Center’s founders: Meyer H. Abrams, Morton Bloomfield, Frederick Burkhardt, Charles Frankel, Robert F. Goheen, Steven Marcus, Henry Nash Smith, Gregory Vlastos, and John Voss.
| 2014–2015 | Mary Elizabeth Berry | University of California, Berkeley | Why Work So Hard? Opportunity, Profit, and Pleasure in Early Modern Japan |
| 2015–2016 | Janice Radway | Northwestern University | Girls and Their Zines in Motion: Selfhood and Sociality in the 1990s |
| 2016–2017 | Kate Marshall | University of Notre Dame | Novels by Aliens |
| 2017–2018 | David Gilmartin | North Carolina State University | Exploring Democracy at the Intersection of Law, Politics and Sovereignty: The Legal History of Elections in India |
| 2018–2019 | Mar Hicks | Illinois Institute of Technology | Queer Users and the Digital State: A Prehistory of Algorithmic Bias |
| 2019–2020 | Katherine Mellen Charron | North Carolina State University | “Possibility Thinkers”: Rural Black Power and Women’s Liberation Politics after 1965 |
| 2020–2021 | Alexis Gumbs | Independent Scholar | The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde: Biography as Ceremony |
| 2021–2022 | Kelly S. McDonough | The University of Texas at Austin | Indigenous Science and Technologies: Nahuas and the World around Them |
| 2022–2023 | Chin Jou | The University of Sydney | Captive Consumers: Prison Food in the Era of Mass Incarceration |
| 2023–2024 | Adeshina Afolayan | University of Ibadan | Philosophy in the Dancehall: Philosophy and Popular Music in Postcolonial Nigeria |
| 2024–2025 | Belle Boggs | North Carolina State University | Big Yellow Bus: The Essential American History of a Disappearing Public Good |