Three affiliates named 2025 Guggenheim Fellows

Three Harvard affiliates were awarded Guggenheim Fellowships this week, winning support for groundbreaking work in sociology, Jewish studies, and sculpture.

Professor of Sociology Christopher Muller, M.A. ’11, Ph.D. ’14, will use the funds to study long-run patterns in the incarceration rates of Black and white Americans, from the Reconstruction era (1865-1877) to the present. The project aims to further clarify the relationship between slavery, peonage, and incarceration. By documenting Southern planters’ influence over local courts, Muller’s research helps make sense of puzzling facts, such as why the Black incarceration rate was lower in the South than in the North for much of the 20th century — and why it was lowest in the South’s cotton belt, where slavery predominated.

Annette Yoshiko Reed, M.T.S. ’99, Krister Stendahl Professor of Divinity and professor of New Testament and early Christianity at Harvard Divinity School, will use the fellowship to complete a book exploring the cultural power of forgetting within Judaism, as well as a related project on Christian erasures of Jews and Judaism as epistemicide. This research will contribute to the theorization of forgetting in memory studies and Jewish studies by exploring the loss of the ancient Jewish literary heritage that was recovered during the mid-20th century with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Katarina Burin, associate lecturer in the Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies, will produce a new body of sculptural work for her project “Planned to be Unplanned: East Brutalism and Personal Monuments.” Drawing on her experiences as an immigrant from the former Eastern Bloc and her long-standing engagement with architectural form, Burin will create site-responsive sculptures that examine the visual and ideological overlaps between American Brutalism and communist-era modernism. Developed through material research and time spent in both Boston and Slovakia, these works will serve as what she calls “anti-monuments”— or poetic interventions that explore memory, urbanism, and the shifting meanings of civic space.

A total of 198 fellows from 83 North American academic institutions were chosen by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation this year. The awardees, representing 53 academic disciplines and artistic fields, were selected on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise from a pool of nearly 3,500 applicants. The class of 2025 hails from 32 U.S. states and the District of Columbia, plus two Canadian provinces.