Education

Harvard Radcliffe Institute Names Its 50 Fellows For 2022.


The Harvard Radcliffe Institute has named the 50 individuals who’ve been selected to be Radcliffe Fellows for 2022–2023. This year’s cohort, which also includes four graduate student fellows, comes from 14 different countries, including the first Radcliffe fellows ever from Paraguay and Peru.

Now in its 22nd year, the Harvard Radcliffe Institute Fellowship Program brings together a range of scholars working in the humanities, sciences, social sciences, and arts—as well as writers, journalists, and others—to pursue their work in a highly concentrated fashion, using all the intellectual and research resources of the Harvard-Radcliffe community.

Radcliffe Fellows are artists, scholars and practitioners at different stages in their professional careers who are invited to the Institute from across the United States and around the world. Fellows are expected to work on an individual project during their fellowship year, which will run from September, 2022 to May, 2023, but they also frequently convene as a group to discuss their projects’ progress.

The following content or practice areas are represented in each class of fellows:

  • Humanities and social sciences, where fellows must have received their doctorate (or appropriate terminal degree) in the area of their proposed project at least two years prior to their appointment as a fellow and have published a monograph or at least two articles in refereed journals or edited collections.
  • Science, engineering, and mathematics, where the recipients also must have received their doctorate at least two years prior to becoming a fellow and have published at least five articles in refereed journals.
  • Creative arts, where fellows meet discipline-specific eligibility requirements in the following fields: film and video, visual arts, fiction and nonfiction, poetry, journalism, playwriting, and music composition.
  • Fellows selected in the practitioners category must have held senior leadership positions in non-profits, government, or the private sector, and they should have at least ten years of relevant professional experience and be acknowledged as leaders in their fields.

Fellows receive a stipend of $78,000 plus an additional $5,000 to cover project expenses. They are also eligible to receive relocation, housing, and childcare funds to aid them in moving to Radcliffe. The fellowship will also pay for Fellows to hire Harvard undergraduate students to assist with their projects.

“So many of us are inspired in this moment to pursue new scholarly approaches and innovative solutions to the pressing challenges we face, and this year’s fellowship class includes an incredible range of important projects,” said Tomiko Brown-Nagin, dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Daniel P. S. Paul Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, professor of history in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and chair of Harvard’s Presidential Committee on Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery.

Included in this year’s class of fellows, a complete list of which can be found here, are such accomplished figures as:

  • Caleb J. Gayle, a professor at Northeastern University and also a fellow at New America, is an award-winning journalist who writes about the impact of history on race and identity. He plans to write a biography of the little-known Black social and political leader Edward P. McCabe, who led the all-Black Kansan town of Nicodemus in the 1880s before attempting to establish an all-Black state in what is now Oklahoma.
  • Jennifer Finney Boylan, the Marilyn Beaudry-Corbett Schlesinger Fellow, is the author of 16 books, a trustee of PEN America, guest columnist for the New York Times, and a transgender rights activist. During her fellowship, Boylan will use the archives of Radcliffe’s Schlesinger Library to write a novel inspired by Amelia Earhart.
  • Tawanna Dillahunt, a professor at the University of Michigan, studies human-computer interaction; environmental, economic, and social sustainability; and equity. While a Fellow at Radcliffe, she will analyze data about how Black and brown Detroiters view alternative economies, new ways of thinking about technology, and ideas for amplifying marginalized voices.
  • Yahya Modarres-Sadeghi, a professor of mechanical and industrial engineering at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, will collaborate with the Harvard biologist George Lauder and his students to design and build a robotic fish that will enable the study of fish behavior in unexplored ocean environments.
  • Anand Giridharadas, political commentator and former columnist with the New York Times, is the author of the international best seller Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World (Knopf, 2018) and the forthcoming The Persuaders: At the Front Lines of the Fight for Hearts, Minds, and Democracy. At Radcliffe, he will work on a new project about democracy in America.
  • Francesca Mari, who teaches at Brown University and is a fellow at New America, is a journalist whose work has appeared in such publications as the Atlantic, the New Yorker, and Texas Monthly. She will work on a book about the housing crisis, focusing on the history of gentrification in Pasadena, California.
  • Melanie Matchett Wood is a mathematician. Currently a professor at Harvard, she held previous academic appointments at Wisconsin, University of California-Berkeley, and Stanford. During her fellowship, she will study the probability theory of random groups, focusing on those that arise naturally in number theory, topology, combinatorics, and other areas.

Commenting on the significance of the Radcliffe fellowships, Claudia Rizzini, executive director of the Fellowship Program, said, “In practical terms, these coveted fellowships offer individuals the chance to place some of their daily responsibilities aside and focus on important projects. The magic of the program, however, is the community. By gathering with individuals from such a wide range of backgrounds and expertise, the Institute becomes an incubator—a place where our fellows can nurture and coax new ideas out of the old, to map previously uncharted paths in the company of other explorers. That is the beauty of a Radcliffe fellowship.”

About the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University

The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University—also known as Harvard Radcliffe Institute—is one of the world’s leading centers for interdisciplinary exploration. It was founded in 1961 by the then-president of Radcliffe College, Mary Ingraham Bunting, with start up funding provided by the Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations. The current Institute structure and name came into being in 1999, when Radcliffe College merged formally with Harvard University.



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