Sixteen Fulbrighters were among the 188 distinguished “culture-creators” the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation appointed as 2024 Guggenheim Fellows. These individuals were chosen through a rigorous application and peer review process, joining the ranks of the 19,000 Guggenheim Fellows since 1925. The selection process recognizes the previous achievements of the Fellows, whose work has broad and immediate social impact.
The Guggenheim Fellowships, established by Senator Simon Scott Guggenheim, allow recipients to pursue independent work in their academic and professional fields under “the freest possible conditions.” Edward Hirsch, award-winning poet and president of the foundation, emphasized that the Guggenheim Fellowship is “a celebrated investment into the lives and careers of distinguished artists, scholars, scientists, writers and other cultural visionaries” who meet “profound existential challenges” and generate “new possibilities and pathways across the broader culture as they do so.”
The backgrounds and variety of professional fields of the Fulbrighters selected as Guggenheim Fellows this year reflect the lasting impact of Fulbright participants and their projects. The cohort includes six Fulbrighters who were recognized for their work in the creative arts, including photography, fiction, dance studies, and music composition.
These Guggenheim Fellows completed their Fulbrights at various stages of their academic careers, whether as recent graduates through the Fulbright U.S. Student Program or Fulbright Foreign Student Program, or as experts in their fields as Fulbright Scholars.
All have gone on to advance their fields through their professional accomplishments, writing fiction and scholarly publications, showing and performing their work in prestigious venues, and leading academic departments and research centers. Many have continued building on the projects they started as Fulbrighters:
Julia Wolfe is an American composer who, as a recent graduate, had a Fulbright U.S. Student Award to the Netherlands to study with composer Louis Andriessen. Wolfe has since become known for exploring themes in American history and telling their stories across musical genres. After her Fulbright, Andriessen continued to be a mentor to Wolfe. She went on to win a 2015 Pulitzer Prize in Music for Anthracite Fields, received a 2016 MacArthur Fellow, and was named Musical America’s 2019 Composer of the Year. She co-founded the music collective Bang on a Can and serves as Artistic Director of NYU Steinhardt Music Composition. Her new collaboration with the Grammy-Award-winning vocal ensemble Theater of Voices is scheduled to have its world premiere at Carnegie Hall in February 2025. Wolfe will use her Guggenheim Fellowship to work on acapella spatial choral music.
Gene Tsudik, PhD, is a computer scientist who received a Fulbright U.S. Scholar Award to Italy at the Sapienza University of Rome to lecture on enhancing graduate study in computer security and privacy. He has also received three Fulbright Specialist awards to work with universities in Burma, Singapore, and Taiwan on computer science and information technology projects. Tsudik is a distinguished professor at the University of California, Irvine specializing in computer security, privacy and applied cryptography. He led projects at the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory and the USC Information Sciences Institute. As a Guggenheim Fellow, Tsudik will use his fellowship to support a new line of research on building Internet-of-Things devices that are resistant to the devastating large-scale malware infestations that have become increasingly common.
Nita Kumar, PhD, is the director of Nirman, a non-profit advancing education and the arts in India, and an emerita professor of South Asian History at Claremont McKenna College. She came to Yale University as a Fulbright Visiting Scholar from India in anthropology. She researched learning culture for a project on rituals of empowerment at home and in school and has subsequently engaged in interdisciplinary research, including on the lives of weavers’ children, working-class women, and rural families. She applies this research as the director of Vidyashram – The Southpoint School, which is an Ashoka Changemaker School in the North Indian State of Uttar Pradesh. As a Guggenheim Fellow, Kumar will combine archival, oral history, and ethnographic research to craft a century-long social history of Uttar Pradesh, focusing on the life of a woman called Suniti.
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Gina Osterloh, Photographer, The Ohio State University
Alum of Fulbright U.S. Student Study/Research Program to Philippines in Photography
Julia Phillips, Fiction Writer
Alum of Fulbright U.S. Student Study/Research Program to Russia in Fiction
Carrie Schneider, Artist
Alum of Fulbright U.S. Student Study/Research Program to Finland in Photography
Rachelle Mozman Solano, Photographer, Tufts University
Alum of Fulbright U.S. Student Study/Research Program to Panama in Photography
Emily Wilcox, Dance Professor, College of William and Mary
Alum of Fulbright U.S. Student Study/Research Program to China in Dance Studies
Julia Wolfe, Composer and Professor of Music Composition, New York University
Alum of Fulbright U.S. Student Study/Research Program to Netherlands in Music Composition
John Connelly, History Professor, University of California, Berkeley
Alum of Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program to Ireland in European & Latin American History
Paul Hardin Kapp, Architecture, Planning, and Design, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Alum of Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program in Architecture, Planning, & Design, to UK and France
Nita Kumar, Historian and Educator, Nirman (nonprofit, India); professor emerita, Claremont McKenna College
Alum of Fulbright Scholar Program from India to U.S. in South & Southeast Asian Studies
Martin Nesvig, History Professor, University of Miami
Alum of Fulbright U.S. Student Study/Research Program to Mexico in European & Latin American History
Gretchen Reydams-Schils, Liberal Studies Professor, University of Notre Dame
Alum of Fulbright Foreign Student Program from Belgium to United States in Classics
Amy Lynn Wlodarski, Music Professor, Dickinson College
Alum of Fulbright U.S. Student Study/Research Program to Germany in Music Research
Travis Zadeh, Religion Professor, Yale University
Alum of Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program to India in Religion
Roger Philip Levy, Neuroscience Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Alum of Fulbright U.S. Student Study/Research Program to Taiwan in Chinese Language and the History of Science
Gene Tsudik, Computer Scientist, University of California-Irvine
Alum of Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program to Italy in Computer Science
Emily T. Yeh, Geography & Environmental Studies Professor, University of Colorado at Boulder
Alum of Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program to China in Geography & Environmental Studies
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This is a program of the U.S. Department of State with funding provided by the U.S. Government.