The Harvard Radcliffe Institute Names Its New Fellows For 2023-24

The Harvard Radcliffe Institute has named 53 individuals to be Radcliffe Fellows for 2023–2024. This year’s selected cohort, which includes three graduate student fellows, represented just 3.3% of the applications that Radcliffe received.

Established in the 1999 merger agreement between Radcliffe College and Harvard University, the Harvard Radcliffe Institute (also known as the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University) seeks to “create an academic community where individuals can pursue advanced work in the academic disciplines, professions, or creative arts. Within this broad purpose, and in recognition of Radcliffe’s historic contributions to the education of women and to the study of issues related to women, the Radcliffe Institute will sustain a continuing commitment to the study of women, gender, and society.”

The Harvard Radcliffe Institute Fellowship Program brings together a range of scholars, journalists, artists and professionals working in three broad areas:

• Humanities and social sciences, where fellows must have received their doctorate (or appropriate terminal degree) in the area of their proposed project at least two years prior to their appointment as a fellow and have published a monograph or at least two articles in refereed journals or edited collections.
• Science, engineering, and mathematics, where the recipients also must have received their doctorate at least two years prior to becoming a fellow and have published at least five articles in refereed journals.
• Creative arts, where fellows meet discipline-specific eligibility requirements in the following fields: film and video, visual arts, fiction and nonfiction, poetry, journalism, playwriting, and music composition.

Radcliffe Fellows are artists, scholars and practitioners at different stages in their professional careers who are invited to the Institute from across the United States and around the world to pursue their work in a concentrated fashion. Fellows are expected to work on an individual project during their fellowship year, which will run from September, 2024 to May, 2025, but they also frequently convene as a group to discuss their projects’ progress.

Fellows receive a stipend of $78,000 plus an additional $5,000 to cover project expenses. They may also be eligible to receive relocation, housing, health care support, and childcare funds to aid them in making a smooth transition to Radcliffe. The fellowship will also pay for Fellows to hire Harvard undergraduate students to assist with their projects.

“This year’s cohort promises, once again, to accomplish incredible things,” said Tomiko Brown-Nagin, Dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Daniel P.S. Paul Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School, and professor of history in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. “As ever, we have outstanding fellows with expertise in a wide range of fields. Many are grappling with some of the most urgent challenges facing humanity, including seven exemplary scholars working at the forefront of research into climate change and issues of climate justice.”

Included in this year’s class of fellows, a complete list of which can be found here, are such accomplished figures as:

• Rich Benjamin, the Anschutz Distinguished Fellow at the Center for the Study of America at Princeton University. At Radcliffe, he will work on a family memoir, which also provides an historical and cultural portrait of post–Cold War America, to be published by Pantheon Books.
• Eddie R. Cole, Associate Professor of Education and History at the University of California, Los Angeles, and author of The Campus Color Line: College Presidents and the Struggle for Black Freedom . At Radcliffe, he will prepare a critical history of American higher education, focusing on the contributions of Black intellectuals, students, and administrators to the development of the modern university.
• Judith Lok, a statistician at Boston University, who is interested in causal inference methods and their applications to areas such as HIV/AIDS, bacterial infections, and maternal and child health. At Radcliffe, she will write a textbook, “Causal Inference: A Statistics Playground,” designed for students and statisticians within and outside academia.
• Harry Mairson, Professor of Computer Science at Brandeis University, is a also a violoncello maker. His Radcliffe project will integrate both interests: he will be building a digital library of iconic instruments from the Italian “Golden Age” of violin making and using it to study the evolution of instrument forms.
• Eduardo Mercado III, Professor of Psychology at the University at Buffalo with interests in neuroscience, computational modeling, experimental psychology, and animal bioacoustics. While at Radcliffe, he plans to write a book on the nature and function of whale songs and use song recordings to identify how humpback whales in Hawaii vocally interact.
• Leah Stokes, the Anton Vonk Associate Professor of Environmental Politics in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She’s the author of the award-winning book Short Circuiting Policy: Interest Groups and the Battle Over Clean Energy and Climate Policy in the American States, a senior policy consultant at the nonprofit Rewiring America, and cohost of the climate podcast A Matter of Degrees. At Radcliffe, she will write a book documenting how climate policy became a priority in Congress and eventually became law through the Inflation Reduction Act.
• Fernanda Viégas is a professor of computer science at Harvard University, who works at the intersection of data visualization, computational design, and human/AI interaction. At Radcliffe, she will conduct research on machine learning interpretability and its potential for greater user control and agency.