Four Columbia professors will receive Guggenheim Fellowships this year to pursue an independent project of their choice. They are among 198 American and Canadian scientists, scholars in the social sciences and humanities, and writers and artists of all kinds selected from nearly 3,500 applicants for a 2025 fellowship.
Since its establishment in 1925, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has given over $400 million in fellowships to more than 19,000 individuals; over 125 of its alumni are Nobel laureates, members of all the national academies, and winners of the Pulitzer Prize, Fields Medal, Turing Award, Bancroft Prize, and National Book Award, among other top honors.
Here’s what the Columbians plan to accomplish in the next year:
Nina Berman, professor of Journalism, will continue work on Acknowledgement of Danger, a documentary photography project, which looks at the business of war, its toxic legacy, and the ongoing environmental impact of U.S. military activities on the American landscape.
Kellen Funk, Michael E. Patterson Professor of Law, will work on a book, American Bail: A History of Wealth-Based Detention in the United States. Drawing on local court and jail archives as well as the papers of figures ranging from William Penn and Aaron Burr to Martin Luther King Jr., the monograph tells the history of the criminal bail bonds system in America from the colonial era to the present.
Harrison Hong, John R. Eckel, Jr. Professor of Financial Economics, will pursue a project about how to model, estimate, and manage extreme weather risks to the economic growth of nations in the age of climate change.
John Ma, professor of Classics and chair of the Classics Department, will pursue research on gender and sexuality in the Hellenistic world (namely, the Afro-Eurasian spaces from Italy to Central Asia and the Indus valley, and the Black Sea to Upper Egypt) in the dynamic period defined by the destruction of the Persian empire and the creation of extensive conquest-states with Greek ruling elites.
