Guggenheim Fellowships have been awarded this year to four scholars from the University of Chicago. Announced April 14, the distinguished writers and scholars join the 101st class of Guggenheim Fellows, honored for “prior career achievement and exceptional promise.”
Profs. Neil Brenner, Claudia Brittenham, Faith Hillis and Alexandra Z. Worden are among the 223 distinguished individuals selected from a pool of nearly 5,000 applicants. As established in 1925 by founder Senator Simon Guggenheim, each fellow receives a monetary stipend to pursue work under “the freest possible conditions.”
“Our new class of Guggenheim Fellows is representative of the world’s best thinkers, innovators, and creators in art, science and scholarship,” said Edward Hirsch, award-winning poet and president of the Guggenheim Foundation. “As the Foundation enters its second century and looks to the future, I feel confident that this new class of 223 individuals will do bold and inspiring work, undaunted by the challenges ahead. We are honored to support their visionary contributions.”
Several UChicago alumni also join the 2026 class of Guggenheim Fellows, including poet Christopher Kempf, PhD’20; comparative urbanist Xuefei Ren, PhD’07; and historians Andrew Sartori, PhD’03, and Eric Zolov, MA'90, PhD’95.
Neil Brenner
Brenner, PhD’99, is the Lucy Flower Professor of Urban Sociology, director of the Urban Theory Lab, and chair of the Committee on Environment, Geography and Urbanization (CEGU). He is a critical urban theorist, sociologist and geographer whose writing and teaching focus on the theoretical, conceptual and methodological dimensions of urban questions. A key concern of his current work is to explore the connections between the capitalist form of urbanization and the planetary socioenvironmental crises of our time.
Brenner will use the fellowship to continue work on a research project and forthcoming book titled Into the Shatter Zone: Planetary Urbanization, Fossil Energy, and Biospheric Crisis. The joint project, with environmental historian and geographer Swarnabh Ghosh (Harvard University), offers a geohistorical reinterpretation of capitalist urbanization in the context of intensifying climate and ecological breakdown.
The book argues that non-city territories and environments—"operational landscapes" of extraction, energy, agriculture, logistics, and waste—are the sociometabolic foundation of capitalist urbanization.
“This proposition requires us to rethink such basic questions as how cities contribute to carbon emissions or biodiversity loss, or more generally, global warming or overpollution,” Brenner said. “It also means we need to rethink, on a fundamental level, the question of urban 'sustainability' to include the question of how cities are supplied with materials, energy, and food, and how they process their waste.”
Claudia Brittenham
A professor in the Departments of Art History and Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity, Brittenham's research focuses on the art of ancient Mesoamerica, with particular attention to the ways that the materiality of art and the politics of style contribute to our understanding of the nature and meaning of images. Her most recent book Unseen Art: Making, Vision, and Power in Ancient Mesoamerica, explores the distance between ancient experiences of works of art and the modern practice of museum display.
During her fellowship year, Brittenham will continue work on her current book project, The Interconnected Mesoamerican World. The project examines how people, objects and ideas moved throughout Mesoamerica—modern-day Mexico, Guatemala, Belize and Honduras—and the history of how we understand and talk about the region.
“The stories we tell about the past are always in some ways stories about the present,” said Brittenham. “In this moment, I feel it is imperative to emphasize that this hemisphere has always been interconnected.”
Faith Hillis
A professor in the Department of History, Hillis is a historian of Russia and modern Europe, with special interests in 19th- and 20th-century politics, culture, ideas and transnational exchanges. Her research and writing have been funded by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Fulbright-Hays Program, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.
Hillis plans to spend the fellowship year finishing her forthcoming book, Forging The Protocols: How Swindlers, Opportunists, and a Host of Historical Accidents Created the Most Notorious Conspiracy of All Time.
A "biography" of the notorious antisemitic forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the book examines the many works from which the notorious forgery drew—adventure novels, political satires and family sagas—and asks how these diverse sources came together to form a single, monstrous libel.
“Shedding new light on the enduring mystery of the forgery's origins, I show how an international group of conspirators collectively co-authored the text over the course of several decades in the service of multiple, chaotic agendas,” Hillis said. “It is quite unsettling to think that the ideas of The Protocols came not from ideological maniacs, but from people driven mostly by avarice and ego—precisely because there are so many of these kinds of people in the world.”
Alexandra Z. Worden
A senior scientist at the Marine Biological Laboratory who is a professor in the Department of the Geophysical Sciences, Worden’s research focuses on the fate and transport of carbon in the oceans—with an emphasis on the photosynthetic microbes that live in the sunlit surface ocean and form the base of marine food chains.
Her group develops methods and technologies for sea-going studies of bacteria, protists, and viruses, and for quantifying their contributions to global primary production, cell-to-cell interactions, and trajectories in future oceans. In addition to pioneering methods for targeting uncultivated microbes in the ocean, her lab has focused on developing methods for investigating environmentally relevant algae in culture under climate change simulations, as well as methods for genetic manipulation of these species.
With the fellowship, Worden will pursue understanding of how deep ocean microbes respond to photosynthetic algae that sink to the seafloor—“a process that results in the removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, but with poorly understood impacts on community transitions in the vast dark ocean,” she said.
