A total of six faculty were awarded Guggenheim Fellowships this week, drawing financial support for research related to everything from political theory to works of historical fiction.
Professor of Anthropology Anya Bernstein’s research focuses on science and technology, death and immortality, human-animal relations, and the environment and climate change. Her last book traced the longstanding pursuit of immortality in Russia, from 19th-century philosophers to Soviet-era experiments to cryonics and biogerontology enthusiasts and entrepreneurs in the 2010s. The Guggenheim Fellowship will support her next book, “Pleistocene Park: Extinction and Eternity in the Russian Arctic,” a transnational ethnography of an experiment to recreate an Ice Age ecosystem in the Russian Arctic, with the goal of slowing permafrost thaw and the powerful climate feedback loop it sets in motion. Following this project from Siberia to gene-editing laboratories in Boston, the book examines how categories of time, species, and death are being reshaped when a landscape from 12,000 years ago is rebuilt as a strategy for human survival.
Mina Cikara, Fredric Wertham Professor of Law and Psychiatry in Society, will investigate how grievance narratives in the aftermath of interethnic violence retain their power over generations, recovering their strength only after the passage of several decades. Cikara points out that those who have firsthand experience as victims of brutality are often the greatest proponents of peace, acting as what she calls “the brakes.” She proposes that grievance itself, acting as “the gas pedal,” persists among the victims’ descendants while the transmission of warnings decays far more rapidly. Her project explores whether this asymmetry explains why support for violence appears to rebound across several cases after two generations.
Historian Adam Mestyan, Ford Foundation Professor of Middle Eastern Studies in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, will use his fellowship to complete a book on the new imperial history of the 20th-century Middle East. Drawing on archival research across the Middle East and Europe, as well as the United Nations archives, Mestyan will examine the diverse ways Arab political actors and movements have challenged imposed territorial arrangements and the nation-state framework since the 1950s through federations, unions, and new Muslim idioms of sovereignty. The book will combine political, legal, and cultural history to explain the persistence of territorial disputes and re-emergence of religion after Arab decolonization — making it both a contribution to debates on state-making in global history and an accessible account reframing the modern Middle East as central to understanding the contemporary world.
Professor of Philosophy Gina Schouten wants to reframe the debate around intellectual diversity in American higher education. Schouten, an expert in social and political philosophy and ethics, plans to use the funds to research and write about the polarized ways people view academia. While some see a problematic ideological homogeneity (liberal professors, liberal bias, and too much political correctness), others see academia’s reputation as a branding issue, its liberal tilt innocent or legitimate. Schouten, the author of “The Anatomy of Justice” (2024) and “Liberalism, Neutrality, and the Gendered Division of Labor” (2019) aims to move the conversation about academia beyond these two viewpoints, and to gear her writing toward a general audience.
Professor of English Namwali Serpell, M.A. ’05, Ph.D. ’08, will use the funds to author a novel about Zambian religious leader Alice Lenshina, a self-proclaimed prophetess who amassed a following of 100,000 in the decade before Zambia gained independence from Britain in 1964. Serpell, whose prize-winning “The Old Drift” (2019) was also set in Zambia, aims to inform her fictional portrait by conducting archival research and interviews in the country. Other noteworthy titles by the Zambian-born author include “On Morrison” (2026) and “The Furrows” (2022).
Daniel Ziblatt, Eaton Professor of the Science of Government and faculty director of the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, received support for “The Case for Democracy,” a book project contending that democracies are losing ground not just because they are losing the fight, but because they are losing the argument — and that reversing that slide requires a sharper, more persuasive case for why democracy matters to citizens. Working at the intersection of political theory and empirical research, Ziblatt places political competition at the center of democratic life, exploring how free and fair competition may be far more than an electoral formality: It is the mechanism that prevents the dangerous accumulation of power, protects civil liberties, enables the peaceful removal of failed leaders, and stops ordinary crises from spiraling into catastrophes. The co-author of “How Democracies Die” (2018) and “Tyranny of the Minority” (2023) examines why authoritarians treat competition as a threat to be neutralized, and how constitutional systems that muffle majority rule may generate their own forms of democratic decay. By building a more vigorous conception of political competition, Ziblatt aims to forge a new and spirited defense of democracy itself.
Established in 1925, the Guggenheim Fellowship has awarded nearly $450 million in monetary stipends to more than 19,000 fellows. A total of 233 fellows, representing 55 scholarly disciplines and artistic fields, were chosen by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation this year. Recipients were selected from a pool of nearly 5,000 applicants on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise, with each receiving financial support (in varying amounts) for current work. The class of 2026 represents 33 U.S. states and the District of Columbia, three Canadian provinces, and eight countries beyond North America.
