Longwood professor Tai Johnson awarded prestigious ACLS and SAR fellowships

Dr. Tai Johnson, assistant professor of history, has been awarded two prestigious national fellowships and will spend the next year finishing a book project that explores the deep history of one of North America's oldest and most biodiverse food systems.

Johnson was recently awarded a 2026 American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship and named a Resident Scholar at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) is the preeminent representative of American scholarship in the humanities and social sciences. The ACLS Fellowship Program is the organization's longest-running program and recognizes excellence in humanities and social sciences research. Johnson is one of 63 scholars selected from a pool of over 2,000 applicants through a multi-stage peer review process.

As a Resident Scholar at the School for Advanced Research, Johnson will join an interdisciplinary cohort of archaeologists, anthropologists and historians, who are all preparing manuscripts on topics important to the understanding of humankind.

Johnson will dedicate the time and resources provided by the two fellowships to completing her book, Shifting Nature: Food, Environment and Health on the Hopi Mesas.

Johnson's project draws on more than 15 years of collaborative research with the Hopi Tribe, a sovereign nation in present-day northeastern Arizona. The book traces the Hopi food system across three centuries, from the mid-19th century through the early 21st century, using oral histories, biocultural museum collections and archival research.

"I'm interested in the intersections of food, health and the environment," said Johnson, who teaches in Longwood's Department of History, Political Science and Philosophy. "My book project explores how policy and global environmental change transformed one of North America's oldest and most biodiverse food systems, disrupting both human and ecological health."

The project also explores broader global questions: how communities maintain or lose control over subsistence resources, how the resilience or erosion of traditional foodways shapes human and ecological health, and how collaborative environmental history can deepen our understanding of the complex connections between food, environment and disease.

Johnson began her research and conducted her first oral history interviews with Hopi agriculturalists while she was completing her master's degree at Northern Arizona University. She expanded her research while earning her PhD at the University of Arizona and has continued it while at Longwood, thanks to support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the university.