Four Arts & Sciences Faculty Win 2026 Guggenheim Fellowships
Four faculty members from the College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences have been awarded 2026 Guggenheim Fellowships, one of the nation’s most prestigious honors for scholars and artists.
History professors Erik Linstrum and Christian McMillen and English professors Emily Ogden and Andrew Stauffer will use the fellowships to pursue ambitious book projects that explore how the past continues to shape and inform contemporary life.
For the College’s leadership, their work epitomizes what makes scholarship in the humanities critical to preparing its students for the future.
“A Guggenheim Fellowship is among the most selective honors in American intellectual life, and to have four faculty selected in a single year speaks to the extraordinary caliber of scholarship in the College,” said Christa Acampora, Buckner W. Clay Professor of Philosophy and dean of Arts & Sciences. “These awards recognize the talent and expertise of our faculty to generate knowledge that crosses traditional boundaries and engages the public in the exploration and understanding of the human experience.”
Rethinking Fascism Through the Lens of Empire
Linstrum, a historian of modern Britain and its empire, is working on a new book that traces the relationship between fascism and imperialism across the 19th and 20th centuries.
“The idea is to tell a more broad-based history of the relationship between fascism and empire,” he said, noting that scholars have often treated fascism as a phenomenon rooted primarily in interwar Europe.
Linstrum aims to widen that frame, arguing that the global systems of empire — particularly the British Empire — formed an important context for fascism’s emergence.
“When we talk about fascism and where it comes from, we can’t overlook the larger world of racial authority, violence and conquest associated with imperial rule,” he said.
The fellowship will give him the time he needs to conduct archival research in Britain, Germany and Italy while synthesizing a wide body of scholarship. And although his research will take him away from the classroom temporarily, he noted that the collaborative nature of scholarship at UVA has played a large part in shaping his work.
In his classroom, particularly his graduate seminar on imperialism and decolonization, where ideas can be challenged and explored in depth, “Just as often it’s the students who have been helping me to make connections as it is the other way around,” Linstrum said.
Ultimately, Linstrum hopes the project will contribute to broader conversations about violence, politics and historical memory. “I hope this work can contribute to what many of my colleagues are doing,” he said, “which is helping to provide a historical perspective on what’s going on in the world today.”
Uncovering the Hidden History of Disappearing Native Land
History professor Christian McMillen, interim vice provost for academic affairs and a scholar of American Indian and legal history, is using his Guggenheim Fellowship to complete a book on American Indian land loss in the 20th century, an era McMillen feels is largely overlooked.
“A lot of American Indian historical scholarship has focused on the 18th and 19th century,” he said. “This project focuses on the way in which individual Indian people have lost their land one plot at a time, which amounts to accumulated losses of about 30 million acres across the 20th century.”
The book will be an investigation of not only how that land was lost, but how Native communities worked to hold onto it and how legal and political systems contributed to those outcomes. For McMillen, the aim of the project is to bring wider awareness to an ongoing but largely forgotten chapter in the nation’s history.
Like several of his colleagues, McMillen, who was also recently invited to become a member of the highly prestigious Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, is writing with a broad audience in mind, he said, emphasizing the value of making humanities research accessible to the broader public, something the Guggenheim will afford him the time to devote to the project.
“What happened with American Indian land loss is, in my view, profoundly important,” he said. “I would really like this story to be better known, and it’s incredibly gratifying that the Guggenheim Foundation is helping to make that possible.”
McMillen said the recognition also highlights the strength of the faculty at UVA. “The humanities and humanistic social sciences are thriving at UVA,” he said, pointing to the University’s long-standing support for research and to the number of Guggenheim winners this year. He added that the moment presents an opportunity to build on that success. “Humanities research is much less expensive and continues to bring the university great prominence,” he said, noting that additional support would help sustain that momentum. “It’s a minimal investment, but look what riches have come to the University as a result!”
The Long Shadow of a Dark Summer
Stauffer, chair of the Department of English, is at work on Dark Season: The Summer of Frankenstein, a book that explores the extraordinary convergence of writers and ideas that produced Mary Shelley’s best-known novel Frankenstein in 1816.
“It’s the story of a summer, but it’s also a group biography,” Stauffer said, describing how Shelley, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley and others gathered near Europe’s Lake Geneva during a year marked by strange, volcanic-induced weather.
“They thought it was going to be a beautiful summer; instead, it was raining and cold because a massive volcano had blanketed the stratosphere with dust…it felt eerie, like the end of the world,” he said. And out of those bleak conditions came not only Frankenstein but also some of the earliest vampire fiction and some of the major works of Romantic poetry.
The Guggenheim Fellowship will allow Stauffer to complete the manuscript and travel to Switzerland to explore that landscape and deepen the book’s historical texture, grounding the literary and historical aspects of the story in something more physical and tangible.
“The Guggenheim year will be the perfect opportunity to do that,” he said.
Beyond the work of providing a historical context for the novel’s inspiration, Stauffer sees Frankenstein as a lens for understanding contemporary concerns — especially artificial intelligence.
“The novel is really the tragedy of what happens when you use technology to introduce a nonhuman intelligent creature into the world. Spoiler: it goes badly,” he said.
More broadly, he views his work as part of a shift toward public-facing scholarship. “What does it mean to profess literature beyond the classroom?” he asked. “It means to write in a way that everyday readers might pick this book up and say, ‘Wow, this is really getting me into a subject.’”
For Stauffer, that mission aligns sharply with the role of the humanities today. “Dean Acampora said something recently that stuck with me. She said, ‘In the College, we're not in the business of teaching transferable skills; we're in the business of transformation.’ I think that’s a nice way of putting it.”
Psychotherapy as Creative Practice
Emily Ogden, a professor of English, is using her Guggenheim Fellowship to explore the early history of psychoanalysis through a new book project, Freud’s Princess.
The project focuses on Marie Bonaparte, a princess of Greece and a descendant of Napoleon who, as one of a circle of women who were Freud’s patients in the early 20th century, helped shape the practice of psychoanalysis.
Ogden describes the book as “a group biography of those women” that also examines “the relationships they had with him and how his theories influenced their understanding of female sexuality.”
Like Stauffer, she aims to reach a broad audience. “The goal is to write for the larger public, but also to draw on research,” she said, emphasizing the importance of bringing humanities scholarship beyond academic circles.
Rather than focusing narrowly on theory, Ogden is interested in psychoanalysis as a lived, creative practice. “One of the ways that we can think of psychoanalysis is as a kind of creative act, as a kind of act of making a new story of one’s life,” she said.
Ogden also sees the recognition that the Guggenheim brings to her work as highlighting the English department’s current strength in public-facing scholarship. “The work of humanities scholarship has many different audiences,” she said. “Part of the work that we do is also to give opportunities to a broader public to consider some of the best of what humanities research can unearth.”
