UC Davis has accepted an invitation to join a prestigious consortium of the American Council of Learned Societies established in 2000 to increase financial support for research in the humanities.

Members of the small and distinguished consortium are all members of the Association of American Universities, a nonprofit association of 63 leading research universities in the United States and Canada.

The consortium is dedicated to increasing the amount and number of fellowships awarded by the 91-year-old ACLS through rigorous, peer-reviewed competitions.

Pauline Yu, ACLS president and a former UCLA humanities dean, cited “the conspicuous success of UC Davis humanities scholars in recent ACLS selections,’’ in her letter inviting the university to join the consortium.

“Expanding support for superlative scholarship is especially important as we face a period of retrenchment in higher education,” Yu wrote.

The invitation acknowledges that UC Davis has increased its stature in the humanities, said Jessie Ann Owens, dean of the Division of Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies.

“This is a terrific honor to be invited to join the ACLS consortium,” Owens said. “It consists of the 32 AAU institutions that have the highest profile in the humanities.”

The organization analyzed UC Davis’ record since 1957.

Since then, UC Davis scholars have received more than $1.4 million in ACLS awards. More than 75 percent of that total, or nearly $1.1 million, has been awarded since 2000.

This year alone, four UC Davis scholars received ACLS fellowships worth a combined $271,500: history professor Catherine Kudlick; English professor David Simpson, the inaugural holder of the Gwendolyn Bridges Needham Endowed Chair; English professor Claire Waters; and Marisol Cortez, who had just earned a Ph.D. in cultural studies.

In 2009, UC Davis associate professors Elizabeth Miller of the English department and Flagg Miller (no relation) of religious studies received two of just 12 Ryskamp fellowships that the ACLS awards nationally each year. The Ryskamp fellowships included grants of nearly $81,000 each.

Ryskamp fellowships support advanced assistant professors and untenured associate professors in the humanities and related social sciences whose scholarly contributions have advanced their fields and who have well-designed and carefully developed plans for new research.

UC Davis was one of just five universities invited to join the ACLS consortium for the first time this year. To date, one other — Vanderbilt — has joined.

Other members of the consortium include UC Berkeley, UCLA, UC Santa Barbara, Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Duke, Emory, Harvard, Indiana University, Johns Hopkins, New York University, Northwestern, Ohio State University, Princeton, Rutgers, Stanford and Yale.

The University of Chicago, Illinois (Urbana-Champaign), University of Michigan (Ann Arbor), University of Minnesota (Twin Cities), University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill), University of Pennsylvania, University of Pittsburgh, University of Southern California, University of Virginia, University of Wisconsin (Madison) and MIT are also members.

Members of the consortium contribute $50,000 a year toward an ACLS fellowship fund.

The ACLS is a private, nonprofit federation of 70 national scholarly organizations that was founded in 1919 to advance humanistic studies in all fields of learning and to maintain and strengthen relations among national societies devoted to such studies.