Fifteen Fulbright alumni have been selected for the Guggenheim Foundation’s 101st class of fellows, joining a distinguished cohort of visionary artists, authors, and innovators across disciplines. Guggenheim Fellows are selected based on outstanding career achievements and exceptional contributions in their respective fields.
As established in 1925 by founder Senator Simon Guggenheim, an American businessman and philanthropist, the privately funded Guggenheim Foundation offers fellowships to “exceptional individuals in pursuit of scholarship in any field of knowledge and creation in any art form, under the freest possible conditions.”
Fulbrighters make up a notable portion of Guggenheim Fellows each year, highlighting the impact of the Fulbright Program and its role in advancing American excellence, innovation, and leadership. Remarking on the Fellows’ achievements, Guggenheim Foundation President Edward Hirsch said the “new class of Guggenheim Fellows is representative of the world’s best thinkers, innovators, and creators.”
Fulbrighters in the 2026 Guggenheim class have participated in the Fulbright Program at all stages of their careers. The Fulbrighters who went on to receive Guggenheim fellowships research, teach, and create art in fields such as Constitutional studies, archeology, photography, and history.
Author and historian Stephen R. Platt was a Fulbright U.S. Student to Taiwan in 2001, as he embarked on his career exploring the China’s cultural, intellectual, and military history of the 19th-20th century. His most recent book, The Raider, is a biography of enigmatic WWII Marine Evans Carlson, who embedded himself in China’s Communist army on a personal mission from President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the late 1930s. Library Journal and History Today both picked it as one of the best books of 2025, and it won the Col. Joseph Alexander Book Award from the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation.
Rasmus Nielsen was a Fulbright Foreign Student from Denmark in 1994. He is an evolutionary biologist and geneticist whose research has transformed our understanding of human evolution and evolutionary genomics. He is best known for developing computational methods to detect natural selection in genomes and for his discoveries on human adaptation to high-altitude environments.
Early in his career, Nathan Arrington, a professor of art and archaeology and Hellenic Studies, was a Fulbright U.S. Student to Greece in 2007. He currently works in ancient Greek material culture, covering art history, archaeology, and classics. Arrington is co-director of the Molyvoti, Thrace, Archaeological Project (MTAP), a cooperative project with the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, which provides opportunities for students to participate in excavations. He also founded an interdisciplinary program to equip students to use archaeological evidence in other fields of inquiry.
Julia Kunin, an accomplished artist known for her iridescent ceramic sculptures and use of rare Hungarian luster glazes, is a faculty member at The Allen-Stevenson School. She was a Fulbright U.S. Scholar at the University of Pécs, Hungary, where she developed new techniques and continues to return as a visiting ceramic artist. Kunin has exhibited widely in the United States and Europe, and has had Pollock‑Krasner, Art Omi, MacDowell, Yaddo, and Skowhegan grants or residencies. Her work may be seen in permanent collections such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Arts and Design, New York.
As a Fulbrighter in Santiago, Chile, contemporary artist and photographer Aspen Mays spent 2009 with astrophysicists using the world’s most advanced telescopes to look at the sky. She created a new body of work entitled Sun Ruins, using archival photographs from the Chilean astronomical observatory. This work was the basis for a 2011 exhibition at GOLDEN Gallery in New York. She currently teaches graduate fine arts and undergraduate photography.
Alan Baker, a Fulbright U.S. Scholar to Estonia, conducts research at the intersection between the philosophy of mathematics and the philosophy of science. With his Guggenheim fellowship, Baker intends to complete his first single-authored book project, whose working title is Mathematical Explanation in Science.
Together, the 15 Fulbright alumni recognized across a range of professional and artistic fields reflect how the Fulbright Program is an unrivaled opportunity for participants to represent American excellence and achievement abroad.
15 Fulbright Alumni selected as 2026 Guggenheim Fellows
Humanities, Social Sciences, and Sciences
Nathan Arrington, Fulbright U.S. Student to Greece, 2007
Alan Baker, Fulbright U.S. Scholar to Estonia, 2007
Christoph Irmscher, Fulbright Visiting Scholar from Germany, 1993
Ieva Jusionyte, Fulbright Foreign Student from Lithuania, 2006
Michael Kaplan, Fulbright U.S. Scholar to Chile, 2017
Gerard N. Magliocca, Fulbright U.S. Scholar to the Netherlands, 2008
Rudolph (Rudi) Matthee, Fulbright Foreign Student from the Netherlands, 1986
Sean Metzger, Fulbright U.S. Scholar to Canada, 2008
Rasmus Nielsen, Fulbright Foreign Student from Denmark, 1994
Stephen Platt, Fulbright U.S. Student to Taiwan, 2001
Mark Christian Thompson, Fulbright U.S. Scholar to Czech Republic, 2003
Eric Zolov, Fulbright U.S. Student to Mexico, 1992; Fulbright U.S. Scholar to Mexico, 2001, and Chile, 2019
Creative Arts
Julia Kunin, Fulbright U.S. Scholar to Hungary, 2013
nia love, Fulbright U.S. Scholar to Ghana, 2001
Aspen Mays, Fulbright U.S. Student to Chile, 2010