Three faculty win Guggenheim Fellowships

Three Yale faculty members are among the 175 writers, scholars, artists, and scientists awarded 2020 fellowships by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Edyta M. Bojanowska, Danna Singer, and A.L. Steiner were chosen from among 3,000 applicants on the basis of their prior achievement and exceptional promise. Bojanowska is professor and director of undergraduate studies in Slavic languages and literatures; Singer is a lecturer at the School of Art; and Steiner is senior critic for film/video at the School of Art. Brief bios follow.

Edyta M. Bojanowska

Bojanowska, who holds a secondary appointment in Yale’s history department, focuses on empire and nationalism in 19th-century Russian literature and intellectual history.  Her first book, “Nikolai Gogol: Between Ukrainian and Russian Nationalism” (2007, Ukrainian translation 2013) challenges the Russocentric myth of Gogol, a Ukrainian-born Russophone writer.  Her recent “A World of Empires: The Russian Voyage of the Frigate Pallada” (Belknap, 2018), uses a mid-19^th-century Russian travelogue about Africa and Asia as a lens into global imperial history and Russian colonial imagination. An effort to integrate Russia into accounts of European imperialism connects “A World of Empires” with Bojanowska's Guggenheim project, “Empire and the Russian Classics” (under contract with Harvard University Press), which explores imperial themes in the works of major 19th-century Russian writers.

Danna Singer

Singer is a photographer and educator who work largely focuses on the social ramifications of economic inequality, depicting the struggles of working-class Americans. Her photographs were selected for The Best New Yorker Photography of 2019, and The New York Times Year in Pictures 2019, and have been published by Der Spiegel, the ACLU, Lens Culture, LensScratch, Feature Shoot, and The New York Times Magazine. In 2018, she was awarded a residency fellowship at Yaddo and named one of PDN's 30 Emerging Photographers to Watch. Singer received her M.F.A. from Yale School of Art in 2017and a B.F.A. from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, New York. She received Yale’s John Ferguson Weir Award (2017) and Schickle-Collingwood Prize (2016), as well as the Juncture Fellowship from the Orville H. Schell, Jr. Center for International Human Rights at Yale Law School (2016). Her photographs have been exhibited nationally and internationally.

A.L. Steiner

Steiner utilizes constructions of photography, video, installation, collage, collaboration, performance, writing, activism, and curatorial work “as seductive tropes channeled through the sensibility of a skeptical queer ecofeminist androgyne,” according to her Guggenheim biography. Steiner is co-curator of Ridykeulous, which foregrounds lesbian-feminist art, and co-founder of Working Artists and the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E.), which focuses on sustainable economic practices between artists and institutions. Her work has been featured recently at the Henry Art Gallery, Centre de la photographie Genève, St. Louis Contemporary Art Museum, Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, and Whitney Museum of American Art, and in permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Hammer Museum, Marieluise Hessel Collection of Contemporary Art, Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, and Museum of Modern Art.

Guggenheim Foundation

Established in 1925, the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation aims to “further the development of scholars and artists by assisting them to engage in research in any field of knowledge and creation in any of the arts, under the freest possible conditions.” Since its inception, the foundation has granted more than $375 million in fellowships to over 18,000 individuals.

“It’s exceptionally encouraging to be able to share such positive news at this terribly challenging time,” said Edward Hirsch, president of the foundation. “A Guggenheim Fellowship has always offered practical assistance, helping fellows do their work, but for many of the new fellows, it may be a lifeline at a time of hardship, a survival tool as well as a creative one. As we grapple with the difficulties of the moment, it is also important to look to the future. The artists, writers, scholars, and scientific researchers supported by the fellowship will help us understand and learn from what we are enduring individually and collectively, and it is an honor for the foundation to help them do their essential work.”