April 19 :
Among the 188 artists, writers, and thinkers from 52 different fields who were awarded Guggenheim Fellowships by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation were four Indian Americans.
A media statement states that the Class of 2024 Guggenheim Fellows were selected from nearly 3,000 applicants after a difficult application and peer evaluation process. Their selection was based on their outstanding promise and previous professional accomplishments.
Each of these disciplines has selected an Indian American: dancer Hari Krishnan, engineer Vivek K. Goyal, general nonfiction writer Sonia Shah, and South and Southeast Asian studies scholar Nita Kumar.
Each fellow is given a monetary stipend to undertake high-level autonomous study under "the freest possible conditions," as was established in 1925 by founder Senator Simon Guggenheim.
"Humanity faces some profound existential challenges," remarked Edward Hirsch, a renowned poet and head of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Receiving the Guggenheim Fellowship is an incredible honour. It's a well-deserved financial commitment to the artistic, intellectual, scientific, literary, and other cultural trailblazers who are tackling these problems directly and opening up new vistas for society at large.
Indian American honorees:
Krishnan Hari
As a dancer, choreographer, scholar, and educator at Wesleyan University's Department of Dance, Hari Krishnan focuses on Bharatanatyam, queer dance, and contemporary dance from a global perspective. Queer themes and the postcolonial complexity of Indian dance are at the heart of his choreographic investigations. His description at Wesleyan University states, "He is among the pioneering generation of choreographers of South Asian origin who began to explore the intersections between traditional South Asian and global contemporary dance forms in the North American diaspora."
He co-founded inDANCE in 1999 and serves as its artistic director. His body of academic work is just as vast as his choreographic body of work. His studies touch on a wide range of historical and social topics, including Bharatanatyam depictions in cinema and queerness and global cultural politics in dance.
The 2020 de la Torre Bueno© First Book Award Committee of the Dance Studies Association bestowed a special mention to his monograph, "Celluloid Classicism: Early Tamil Cinema and the Making of Modern Bharatanatyam" (Wesleyan University Press, 2019). He is the recipient of multiple accolades.
Vivek K. Goyal
At Boston University's College of Engineering, Vivek K. Goyal holds the positions of professor and associate chair of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department's Doctoral Programmes. Both the University of Iowa (BS 1993; BSE 1993) and the University of California, Berkeley (MS 1995; PhD 1998) bestowed degrees upon him.
Before joining Google's Nest Labs to incorporate 3dim Tech's technology, he worked as a technical staff member at Bell Labs, a senior research engineer at Digital Fountain, a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley, and a professor in the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Quantization, statistical signal processing, information representation, computational imaging, and human perception and decision-making are some of his areas of interest in the field of computational imaging. Foundations of Signal Processing, released by Cambridge University Press in 2014, is a textbook that he co-authored and which he has contributed to with over 200 other articles.
Foundations and Trends in Signal Processing, SIAM Journal on Imaging Sciences, IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, IEEE Open Journal of Signal Processing, and IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing all have him on their editorial boards. Among his many accolades is the designation of 2022 as an American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellow. Along with Optica, he is a Fellow of the IEEE.
Sonia Shah
Writing on a variety of topics, writer Sonia Shah has authored books such as "The Fever: How malaria has ruled humankind for 500,000 years" (2010), "Pandemic: tracking contagions from cholera to Ebola and beyond" (2017), and "The Next Great Migration: the beauty and terror of life on the move" (2020).
A recipient of the 2023 Whiting Grant for Creative Nonfiction, her upcoming book "Special: the Rise and Fall of a Beastly Idea" will be published by Bloomsbury. The author's work on politics, science, and human-animal relations has been published in various prestigious journals and magazines. Her speeches and interviews have been featured on CNN, RadioLab, Fresh Air, and TED.com, where her talk titled "Three Reasons We Still Haven't Gotten Rid of Malaria" has been viewed by more than one million people from all over the globe.
Nita Kumar,
Nita Kumar is the present head of the Varanasi-based arts and education nonprofit Nirman. She has taught history at several institutions, including Brown University, the University of Michigan, and the University of Chicago, where she earned her doctorate in history.
At Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California, she held the position of Brown Family Chair of South Asian History for the most part recently. Kumar has done fruitful work in both the area of history and anthropology, having studied both disciplines concurrently.
In her method, she has progressed to incorporate fields such as education, performance studies, literary criticism, women's and gender studies, and more. She has written about the lives of working-class women, children of weavers, and families from rural areas.
