Meet the 2025–2026 Fellows of the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers

Dan Bouk

The Subway Job

The Joanna Jackson Goldman Fellow in American History

Dan Bouk researches the history of bureaucracies, quantification, and other modern subjects. He is the author of How Our Days Became Numbered: Risk and the Rise of the Statistical Individual and Democracy's Data: The Hidden Stories in the U.S. Census and How to Read Them, which was a New York Times Notable Book. His work includes essays and articles on the history of personal data in the U.S. and on the concept of the "baby boom" generation, as well as the report House Arrest: How an Automated Algorithm Has Constrained Congress for a Century. He has been a fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, the Charles Babbage Institute, and the Data & Society Research Institute. At the Cullman Center, he will work on a nonfiction tale of a historical heist involving transportation infrastructure, networked data, and experts fighting for New York City's ordinary workers and families, tentatively titled The Subway Job.

Vajra Chandrasekera

Leonid: A Novel

Vajra Chandrasekera is from Colombo, Sri Lanka. His debut novel, The Saint of Bright Doors, won Nebula, Ignyte, Locus, and Crawford Awards, and was shortlisted for the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize, a Lambda Literary Award, and the Hugo Award, among others. His second novel, Rakesfall, is also nominated for a Nebula Award, was a New York Times Notable Book, and was chosen as one of the best books of 2024 by NPR and Esquire. His short stories, poems, and articles have appeared in many publications including Clarkesworld Magazine, West Branch, and the Los Angeles Times. At the Cullman Center, he will work on a novel that explores pre- and post-coloniality through the lens of Sri Lanka, with a particular focus on the transformations of Buddhist ideologies.

Brad Fox 

The Book of the Silent Witness

Brad Fox is the author of The Bathysphere Book: Effects of the Luminous Ocean Depths, a work of nonfiction about the first deep ocean dives, which was awarded the National Book Foundation’s Science and Literature Prize. His novel To Remain Nameless was a staff pick at the Paris Review and finalist for the Big Other Book Award. His stories and articles have appeared in the New Yorker, Guernica, the Paris Review Daily, and the Public Domain Review. His new nonfiction book, Another Bone-Swapping Event, on an inadvertent year spent in the Peruvian Amazon, will be published in November 2025. At the Cullman Center, he will work on a book of history, fiction, and essay about the 13th-century traveler Badr al-Habashi, of whom there is almost no trace. 

M. Leona Godin

Learning to See with AI: On Blindness and Photography

The Jean Strouse Fellow

M. Leona Godin is the author of There Plant Eyes: A Personal and Cultural History of Blindness and the founder of Aromatica Poetica, an arts and culture laboratory for the advancement of smell and taste. She creates multisensory performance journeys that explore the rich potentials of synesthesia and disability aesthetics, and she is a curatorial researcher for the forthcoming Museum of the Blind People’s Movement. Godin’s writing has appeared in the New York Times, ARTnews, O Magazine, and Literary Hub, among other publications. At the Cullman Center, she will work on a book about blindness, photography, and image description, which she began as a 2023 NYPL Diamonstein-Spielvogel Fellow.

Gregg Hecimovich

The Columbia Seven: The Life and Times of the Zealy Daguerreotypes

Gregg Hecimovich is the author of The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the American Book Award, and the Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Award. Life and Times was named one of the 10 Best Books of 2023 by the Washington Post. It was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN/Jaqueline Bograd Weld Award, and received an honorable mention for the William Sanders Scarborough Prize from the Modern Language Association. Hecimovich is the recipient of a 2025 Guggenheim fellowship, as well as multiple fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Center, and the Hutchins Center at Harvard University. At the Cullman Center, he will work on The Columbia Seven, a reclamation of the life stories of seven enslaved men and women—Alfred, Delia, Drana, Fassena, Jack, Jem, and Renty—who were photographed by the artist Joseph T. Zealy in Columbia, South Carolina, in 1850.

Colin Jones

The Revolutionary World of Maximilien Robespierre: Celebrity, Micro-Politics and Terror in the French Revolution

The John and Constance Birkelund Fellow

Colin Jones is a historian of France and emeritus professor of history at Queen Mary University of London. His books include Paris: Biography of a City, The Smile Revolution in Eighteenth Century Paris, The Fall of Robespierre: 24 Hours in Revolutionary Paris, and The Shortest History of France. At the Cullman Center, he will work on a book about Robespierre that draws on untapped archival sources in order to create a multi-perspectival analysis of this major yet enigmatic figure in the French Revolution and sets his ideas in the context of friendship groups, patronage, networking, espionage, and the emerging world of celebrity politics.

Aparna Kapadia

Kasturba Gandhi: Walking with the Mahatma

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellow

Aparna Kapadia is an associate professor of history at Williams College. Her research focuses on early modern and modern South Asia, with particular emphasis on western Indian regional cultures, identities, and power structures. She is the author of In Praise of Kings: Rajputs, Sultans and Poets in Fifteenth-Century Gujarat and co-editor of The Idea of Gujarat: History, Ethnography and Text. Her writing has appeared in academic journals including the Medieval History Journal and the Journal of Asian Studies, as well as in her column Off Centre for Scroll.in, one of India’s leading independent news outlets. She serves on the editorial board of the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society. Her research has been supported by a Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Award. At the Cullman Center, Kapadia will work on a biography of Kasturba Gandhi (1869–1944) that, based on new archival research, examines her life and activism within the broader context of women’s leadership in India’s anticolonial movement

Rowena Kennedy-Epstein

Mother of Us All: The Life and Writing of Muriel Rukeyser

Rowena Kennedy-Epstein is a professor of gender studies and women's writing at the University of Bristol. She is the author of Unfinished Spirit: Muriel Rukeyser’s Twentieth Century, which won the Matei Calinescu Prize from the Modern Language Association. She has edited three editions of Rukeyser’s work: with Eric Keenaghan, The Muriel Rukeyser Era: Selected Prose; Rukeyser’s lost novel, Savage Coast; and Barcelona, 1936: Selections from the Spanish Civil War Archive. She has received a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholars fellowship and an NYPL Diamonstein-Spielvogel fellowship, and she was a visiting scholar at the Oxford Center for Life-Writing. At the Cullman Center, she will work on the first biography of American writer Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980), whose poetry, plays, films, novels, and biographies—accounts of war and the rise of fascism, racial injustice, environmental disaster, motherhood, and sexuality—defied and remade women's positions in 20th-century America. 

Jordan Kisner

The Circle March

Jordan Kisner is an essayist and cultural reporter, and the author of the book Thin Places. She is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and was a contributing writer for the Atlantic, and a columnist for the Paris Review Daily. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and a National Magazine Award finalist. Her writing has been selected for The Best American Essays and has received support from the Black Mountain Institute, Hedgebrook, Pioneer Works, Millay Arts, and Art Omi. She is an assistant professor of English at Bowdoin College. At the Cullman Center, she will work on a book-length essay about Shakerism, one of the longest-running utopian experiments in America.

Katie Kitamura

Untitled Novel

The Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellow

Katie Kitamura’s most recent novel is Audition. She is also the author of Intimacies, named one of the 10 Best Books of 2021 by the New York Times and one of Barack Obama’s Favorite Books of 2021; it was longlisted for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and won the prix littéraire Lucien Barrière. Her third novel, A Separation, was a finalist for the Premio Gregor von Rezzori and a New York Times Notable Book. The recipient of a Rome Prize, she is also the author of Gone to the Forest and The Longshot, both finalists for The New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award. Her work has been translated into 21 languages and is being adapted for film and television. At the Cullman Center, she will work on a novel about cinema, translation, the archive, and Japanese Imperialism.

Raven Leilani

Untitled Novel

The Rona Jaffe Foundation Fellow

Raven Leilani is the author of Luster. She is a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree and the recipient of the Kirkus Prize, the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Clark Fiction Prize, and the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. Her writing has appeared in n+1, the New Yorker, and the New York Review of Books. She teaches creative writing at Harvard. At the Cullman Center, she will work on a novel that explores faith, pleasure, and deprivation.

David Mills

Uncovering the The

David Mills has published three poetry collections: The Sudden Country, The Dream Detective, and Boneyarn, a book of poems about New York’s African Burial Ground, the oldest and largest slave cemetery in the country. Boneyarn won the North American Poetry Book Award and was a finalist for the Crab Orchard Review Prize. His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, the Colorado Review, Crab Orchard Review, Jubilat, Poetry Daily, and Fence. He has received the Brooklyn Non-Fiction Prize and the Langston Hughes Society Award, as well as grants, fellowships, and residencies from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Bread Loaf, the New York State Council on the Arts, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Lannan Foundation. He wrote the audio script for Deborah Willis’s curated exhibition Reflections in Black: 100 Years of Black Photography, which showed at the Whitney Museum. At the Cullman Center, he will work on a poetry collection about the under-told story of Bronx slavery.

Benjamin Moser

Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History

Benjamin Moser is the author of Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and a New York Times Notable Book. For his work bringing Clarice Lispector to international prominence, including his role in publishing her complete works in English, he received Brazil’s first State Prize for Cultural Diplomacy. He is also the author of Sontag: Her Life and Work, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for biography. His most recent book, The Upside-Down World: Meetings with the Dutch Masters, was published in 2023. At the Cullman Center, he will work on a global history of anti-Zionist Jews.

Małgorzata Sikorska-Miszczuk

“Goodbye Sister, We Won’t See Each Other Again!”

Małgorzata Sikorska-Miszczuk is a playwright, librettist, and screenwriter. Her plays have received numerous international awards, have been translated into over a dozen languages, and have been staged in Poland, the US, Mexico, Germany, France, Austria, Russia, and elsewhere. Six contemporary operas composed to her librettos have been produced on major stages, and her adaptation of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain garnered critical acclaim. Her screenwriting credits include feature films, television series, and experimental works. She has lectured and taught master classes in writing for the stage and the screen at Wajda School, the Aleksander Zelwerowicz National Academy of Dramatic Art, and the Institute of Literary Research at the Polish Academy of Sciences. At the Cullman Center, she will work on a play about an experimental, fascist Russian state formed by the Nazis—the Lokot Republic—and its executioner.

Krithika Varagur

The Singh Princesses

The Janice B. and Milford D. Gerton / Arts and Letters Foundation Fellow

Krithika Varagur is a writer and editor in New York. Her work has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, the London Review of Books, and the New York Times, and been recognized with a Silvers-Dudley Prize, a Leon Levy biography fellowship, an Overseas Press Club Award, and the Newswomen’s Club of New York’s Marie Colvin Front Page Award for foreign correspondence. She has been an editor at the Drift since it launched in 2020, as well as a National Geographic Explorer, a speechwriter, and an Amtrak writer-in-residence. At the Cullman Center, she will work on a history book about the Princesses Duleep Singh, three Anglo-Indian sisters born and raised in Victorian England.