Five Yale faculty members are among the 198 individuals across more than 50 scholarly disciplines and artistic fields awarded 2025 fellowships by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation this week.
Katherine Balch, Marie-Helene Bertino, Molly Brunson, Oona Hathaway, and Tommy Kha were selected from a pool of nearly 3,500 applicants to be part of the 100th class of Guggenheim Fellows. Fellows are selected based on prior career achievement and exceptional promise; each receives a monetary stipend to support their pursuit of independent work.
Since its founding in 1925, the Guggenheim Foundation has awarded more than $400 million in fellowships to more than 19,000 scholars, writers, scientists, and artists.
The “creative thinkers” in this year’s class “can take on the challenges we all face today and guide our society towards a better and more hopeful future,” said Edward Hirsch, the foundation’s president. Among the themes and issues this year’s fellows are working on are climate change, Indigenous studies, identity, democracy and politics, incarceration, and the purpose of community.
Two of Yale’s recipients have primary appointments in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), and the remaining three have primary appointments at the university’s professional schools of law, music, and art.
Katherine Balch, assistant professor, adjunct, of composition in the Yale School of Music, is a composer whose work has been commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the New York Philharmonic, and the London Sinfonietta, as well as by the symphony orchestras in Pittsburgh, Dallas, Minnesota, Oregon, Albany, Indianapolis, and Tokyo. She has described her work as a composer as inspired by “tiny sounds, leaves, stacks of thirds, and music that jitters.” She was composer-in-residence for the California Symphony Orchestra from 2017 to 2020 and the recipient of a 2020-2021 Elliott Carter Rome Prize, a competitive fellowship awarded annually by the American Academy in Rome to advance research in the arts and humanities.
Marie-Helene Bertino, the Ritvo-Slifka Writer in Residence and a lecturer in English, is an award-winning fiction writer whose most recent novel, “Beautyland,” was a National Book Critics Circle award finalist. She is also the author of “2 a.m. at The Cat’s Pajamas” (2014) and “Parakeet” (2020). Her 2012 story collection, “Safe as Houses,” won the Iowa Short Fiction Award. Her second story collection, “Exit Zero,” will be published this month. Bertino’s work has also appeared in The New York Times, Tin House, Electric Literature, Granta, and many other outlets.
Molly Brunson, associate professor in Slavic language and literatures, with a secondary appointment in the history of art, specializes in 19th- and 20th-century Russian literature and visual art, with an emphasis on the realisms that emerged in imperial Russia and the Soviet Union. Her 2016 book “Russian Realisms: Literature and Painting, 1840-1890,” was awarded the “Best Book in Cultural Studies” by the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages. Her current book project, “The Russian Point of View: Perspective and the Birth of Modern Russian Culture,” connects the introduction of linear perspective in Russia to the shaping of a national culture. Brunson is also faculty director for the Yale Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies Program at the Yale MacMillan Center.
Oona Hathaway is the Gerard C. and Bernice Latrobe Smith Professor of International Law at Yale Law School and a professor in the Department of Political Science. She is also on the faculty of the Jackson School of Global Affairs and the director of the Yale Law School Center for Global Legal Challenges. She has been a member of the advisory committee on international law for the legal adviser at the U.S. Department of State for two decades. In 2014–15, she served as special counsel to the general counsel at the U.S. Department of Defense, where she was awarded the Office of the Secretary of Defense Award for Excellence. She is a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She is an executive editor at Just Security, a digital law and policy journal.
Tommy Kha, critic at the Yale School of Art, is a photographer who currently works between Brooklyn, New York and his hometown of Memphis, Tennessee. He holds an MFA in photography from Yale. His debut monograph, “Half, Full, Quarter” (Aperture, 2023), which brings together his East Asian heritage with life in the American South, was featured in The New York Times and Artforum. He is the recipient of the Hayes Prize, Next Step Award, Foam Talent, and NYSCA/NYFA Photography Fellowship.
