Henry Stoll, assistant professor of musicology, has been named the Susan McClary and Robert Walser Fellow of the ACLS (American Council of Learned Societies), one of 62 recipients of a 2025 ACLS Fellowship. Of the fellows selected from 2,300 applicants in a multi-stage peer review process, Stoll is the only recipient in music studies and one of just three U-M awardees in 2025. The award provides up to $60,000 to support the full-time work of fellows for six to 12 months, funding those that advance the social sciences and humanities.
Holding a PhD in historical musicology from Harvard University and a certificate in Latin American studies, Stoll focuses on the music of the Haitian Revolution. He is ecstatic to receive this honor and continue his work in global musicology, noting that “The news sent me airborne. With the state of research funding right now, especially for the humanities, opportunities like this feel miraculous.”
The project supported by the fellowship is Stoll’s book Unsung: The Revolutionary Music of Haiti. An abstract of Stoll’s project states:
With the beginning of the Haitian Revolution in 1791, a group of writers and politicians took hostage the music of their French oppressors and, retaining the melodies and meters of revolutionary Paris, replaced the lyrics to celebrate their newly liberated land. Assembling these works of parody for the first time, Unsung tells the story of how the leaders of Haiti used music – in particular, song – to broadcast radical new conceptions of freedom and personhood in the wake of the revolution. Of course, this phenomenon – European music for a proudly Afro-diasporic nation – may appear unexpected. But herein lies the book’s central claim: far from rejecting French music, early Haitians considered it their inalienable patrimony – their musical spoil of war – and, adapting it to local aesthetic and political demands, wreaked havoc on Atlantic narratives of Black incapacity for self-rule and artistic achievement. Drawing on an unsung legacy of three operas and over one hundred songs, the book ultimately offers not only a music history of early Haiti, but a cultural history of a period in which the revolutionary ideals of liberté, égalité, and fraternité were negotiated on both sides of the Atlantic – always with musical ramifications.
Congratulations to Stoll on this fellowship.