2024 Guggenheim Fellowships Awarded To Hampshire Alum and Faculty Emerita

Chosen through a rigorous review process from 3,000 applicants, they were among 188 scholars, photographers, novelists, historians, and data scientists to receive a 2024 Fellowship.

The Guggenheim Fellowship will support Hillman’s work on a series of three short films including Flamme dans l’eau, a film exploring poet Franck André Jamme's travels in Nepal and Rajasthan to seek out the origins of Tantric paintings used to awaken heightened states of consciousness. Benjamin will use the award to finish her current book, Terrestrial: Jewish Thought and a World Disrupted, “which analyzes how ecological crisis challenges core elements of Jewish theology and proposes constructive possible paths for reconstructing it,” she said.

“Humanity faces some profound existential challenges,” said Edward Hirsch, award-winning poet and president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. “The Guggenheim Fellowship is a life-changing recognition. It’s a celebrated investment into the lives and careers of distinguished artists, scholars, scientists, writers and other cultural visionaries who are meeting these challenges head-on and generating new possibilities and pathways across the broader culture as they do so.”

In all, 52 scholarly disciplines and artistic fields, 84 academic institutions, 38 U.S. states and the District of Columbia, and four Canadian provinces are represented in the 2024 class, who range in age from 28 to 89. More than 40 Fellows (roughly 1 out of 4) do not hold a full-time affiliation with a college or university. Many Fellows’ projects directly respond to timely issues such as democracy and politics, identity, disability activism, machine learning, incarceration, climate change and community. Since its founding in 1925, the Foundation has awarded over $400 million in fellowships to more than 19,000 fellows.

To see the full list of new Fellows, please visit www.gf.org.