Current Fellows

Charles Blow

2025-2026

Langston Hughes Fellow

Charles Blow is a writer, journalist, and former Opinion columnist for The New York Times .

Jordan Brown

2025-2026

Dorothy Porter Fellow

Jordan R. Brown is an ethnomusicology doctoral candidate at Harvard University with a secondary field in African and African American Studies. Her current research interests include Black underground politics, Black feminist theory and queer theory, Black...

Rodney Carmichael

2025-2026

Nasir Jones Hiphop Fellow

Rodney Carmichael is a storyteller, journalist and cultural critic, covering hip-hop at NPR Music since 2017. He often works at the intersection of race and inequality, telling stories across mediums that combine reporting and criticism to spotlight the...

Kendra Taira Field

2025-2026

Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellow

Dr. Kendra Taira Field is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Center for Public History at Tufts University. Field is the author of Growing Up with the Country: Family, Race, and Nation after the Civil War (Yale, 2018), which traced her own...

Arlette Frund

Spring 2026

Hutchins Family Foundation Fellow

Arlette Frund is Professor Emerita at the University of Tours, France. Her scholarly and teaching specializations are in African American literature and culture. She is the author of Phillis Wheatley et Olaudah Equiano: Figures pionnières de la diaspora...

Cheryl Townsend Gilkes

Spring 2026

Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellow

Cheryl Townsend Gilkes is the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Sociology and African American Studies Emerita at Colby College.

André Holland

2025-2026

Black Film Project Fellow

André Holland is an acclaimed actor, theater director, and film producer. He produced and starred in High Flying Bird, The Eddy, Exhibiting Forgiveness and the Sundance-premiered Love, Brooklyn. Known for his roles in Moonlight and Selma, Holland has also...

Raven Jackson

2025-2026

Black Film Project Fellow

Raven Jackson is an award-winning filmmaker, poet, and photographer from Tennessee. Her work often explores landscapes of indefinable experiences and emotions, intimacy, connection, and the body’s relationship to nature. Recently nominated for a Film...

Darol Olu Kae

2025-2026

Black Film Project Fellow

Darol Olu Kae is an award-winning filmmaker based in Los Angeles. His work has gained international acclaim, showcased at renowned venues like the Locarno, Sundance, and SXSW Film Festivals, as well as BAM, Film at Lincoln Center, MoMA, and The Geffen...

Justine McConnell

Spring 2026

McMillan-Stewart Fellow

Justine McConnell is Reader in Comparative Literature and Classical Reception at King’s College London. Her research focuses on African diaspora literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, on ancient Greek literature, and on the...

Jordan Taliha McDonald

2025-2026

Hutchins Family Foundation Fellow

Jordan Taliha McDonald is a Doctoral Candidate in the English Department with a secondary field in History of Science at Harvard University. Her scholarship primarily examines how literary, scientific, and aesthetic ideas of complicity and fidelity were...

Charmaine A. Nelson

2025-2026

McMillan-Stewart Fellow

Charmaine A. Nelson  was appointed a Provost Professor of Art History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2022 where she founded the Slavery North Initiative. Her nine books include  The Color of Stone: Sculpting the Black Female Subject in...

Sanele Ntshingana

Fall 2025

Mandela Fellow

Sanele Ntshingana is a lecturer in the African Languages section of the School of Languages and Literatures at the University of Cape Town, with over five years of experience in the higher education sector. His PhD research explores how isiXhosa-speaking...

Hollis Robbins

2025-2026

Hutchins Family Foundation Fellow

Hollis Robbins is Professor of English and Special Advisor for Humanities Diplomacy at the University of Utah, where she was Dean of Humanities from 2022-2024. Previously she was Dean of Arts & Humanities at Sonoma State University (2018-2022) and...

Anna Deavere Smith

2025-2026

Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellow

Anna Deavere Smith is University Professor in Art and Public Policy at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University.

Aurora Vergara-Figueroa

2025-2026

Mark Mamolen Fellow

Aurora Vergara-Figueroa is Colombia’s first Afro-Colombian Minister of National Education and former Deputy Minister of Higher Education, where she advanced equity and access in higher education while shaping national policy. She is the founder of the...

Ted Widmer

2025-2026

W. E. B. Du Bois Fellow

Ted Widmer is an historian and former presidential adviser who writes widely on history, politics and their intersection. He is Distinguished Lecturer at the Macaulay Honors College of the City University of New York. From 1997 to 2001, he was a foreign...