Guggenheim Fellows: Four Indian Americans Among Distinguished and Diverse Culture Creators

Four Indian Americans are among 188 Guggenheim Fellows, a distinguished and diverse group of culture-creators working across 52 disciplines. They include Hari Krishnan, professor, Department of Dance at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut (Choreography); Vivek K. Goyal, professor and associate chair of Doctoral Programs, Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at Boston University in Cambridge, Massachusetts (Engineering); writer Sonal Shah of Baltimore, Maryland (General Nonfiction), and historian Nita Kumar, director of nonprofit Nirman in Varanasi, a non-profit that works for education and the arts in Varanasi (South & Southeast Asian Studies).

Chosen through a rigorous application and peer review process from a pool of almost 3,000 applicants, the Class of 2024 Guggenheim Fellows was tapped on the basis of prior career achievement and exceptional promise. As established in 1925 by founder Senator Simon Guggenheim, each fellow receives a monetary stipend to pursue independent work at the highest level under “the freest possible conditions.”

Hari Krishnan, professor, Department of Dance at Wesleyan University, is a dancer, choreographer, scholar, and educator who specializes in Bharatanatyam, queer dance, and contemporary dance from global perspectives. His choreographic explorations center both postcolonial complexities in Indian dance as well as queer themes. “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,” according to his  Wesleyan University profile, He is also the artistic director of inDANCE, which he founded in 1999. His scholarly repertoire is as extensive as his choreographic one. His research covers historic and sociological themes, from queerness and global cultural politics in dance to representations of Bharatanatyam in film. His monograph, “Celluloid Classicism: Early Tamil Cinema and the Making of Modern Bharatanatyam” (Wesleyan University Press, 2019) won a special citation from the 2020 de la Torre Bueno^© First Book Award Committee of the Dance Studies Association. He has received several awards and honors. 

Vivek K. Goyal is professor and associate chair of Doctoral Programs for the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Boston University College of Engineering. He received degrees from the University of Iowa (BS 1993; BSE 1993) and the University of California, Berkeley (MS 1995; PhD 1998). He was a member of technical staff at Bell Labs, senior Research Engineer at Digital Fountain, visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, faculty member in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Nest Labs, a division of Google, to integrate technology from 3dim Tech. His research interests include computational imaging, information representation, statistical signal processing, quantization, and human decision making and perception. He has published more than 200 papers in these areas and co-authored a textbook (Foundations of Signal Processing, Cambridge University Press 2014). He serves on the editorial boards of IEEE Open Journal of Signal Processing, IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, SIAM Journal on Imaging Sciences, and Foundations and Trends in Signal Processing. He is the recipient of several awards,  and was named a 2022 Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is also a Fellow of the IEEE and of Optica.

Sonia Shah is a journalist,, and author of “The Next Great Migration: the beauty and terror of life on the move “(2020); “Pandemic: tracking contagions from cholera to Ebola and beyond” (2017), and “The Fever: How malaria has ruled humankind for 500,000 years” (2010) among others. Her new book, “Special: the Rise and Fall of a Beastly Idea,” winner of a 2023 Whiting Grant for Creative Nonfiction, is forthcoming from Bloomsbury. Her writing on science, politics, and human-animal relations has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the New Yorker, the Nation, Foreign Affairs, Scientific American and elsewhere and has been featured on CNN, RadioLab, Fresh Air, and TED.com, where her talk, “Three Reasons We Still Haven’t Gotten Rid of Malaria” has been viewed by over 1,000,000 people around the world.

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Nita Kumar is currently director of Nirman, a non-profit that works for education and the arts in Varanasi. She completed her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in History and has taught at the University of Chicago, Brown University, and the University of Michigan among other places. She was mostly recently the Brown Family Chair of South Asian History at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California. Kumar studied Anthropology alongside History and has been productive in research and publishing in both fields. She has further moved on to include women’s and gender studies, literary criticism, education and performance studies in her approach. She has worked with weavers’ children, working-class women, and village families, and also written about them. 

(Top main photo, courtesy of Wesleyan University Magazine.)