Philosophy and art faculty win Guggenheim fellowships

Kate A. Manne, professor of philosophy in the College of Arts and Sciences, and Leeza Meksin, assistant professor of art in the College of Architecture, Art and Planning, have been named 2026 fellows by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Manne and Meksin are two of the 223 artists, scientists and scholars in 55 fields awarded the Guggenheim fellowship this year, selected from nearly 5,000 applicants.

"Our new class of Guggenheim Fellows is representative of the world's best thinkers, innovators and creators in art, science and scholarship," said foundation President Edward Hirsch in a press release. "As the foundation enters its second century and looks to the future, I feel confident that this new class of 223 individuals will do bold and inspiring work, undaunted by the challenges ahead. We are honored to support their visionary contributions."

The fellowships are awarded on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise, and provide fellows with six to 12 months of time to work with as much creative freedom as possible.

"I'm hugely grateful and humbled by this recognition, and the opportunity," said Manne, whose research focuses on moral, feminist and social philosophy.

"As the result of the fellowship, I'll be able to take an extra semester of sabbatical to write my next book, which is a feminist story about the nature of morality," she said. "I want to explore and defend the view that moral imperatives have their basis in bodily imperatives. It's a project that's been brewing for 15 years, and I'm so excited to have the time to devote myself to it fully."

Manne is the author of "Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny" (2017), "Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women" (2020) and "Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia" (2024), which was a National Book Award finalist. Her opinion pieces, essays and reviews on moral and political topics have appeared in the New York Times, the Boston Review, the Huffington Post, the Chronicle of Higher Education and the Times Literary Supplement.

For the past two decades, Meksin has been making site-specific architectural installations with stretch fabrics that create dialogue between soft materials and the built urban environment. As a Guggenheim fellow, she said she plans on creating a series of architectural interventions that utilize neoprene coverings to help shift and reexamine how public space within these structures - specifically Brutalist museums in the Northeast - are utilized.

"In making monumental but temporary installations I reflect on the impermanent and vulnerable aspects of our embodied experience, while transforming the typically cold and drafty atriums into a warm, glowing and inviting space for connection and community-building," Meksin said. "In creating 'Oracle for Brutalist Architecture,' I highlight the shape, scale and history of existing Brutalist structures and shift these forms into a more intimate and body-affirming realm, that prioritizes human experience over highbrow ideology."

Meksin's installations have been featured at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the National Academy of Design and Columbia University Lenfest Center for the Arts. She co-founded and co-directs the artist-run gallery and curatorial collective Ortega y Gasset Projects in Brooklyn. In 2015, she received the emerging artist grant from the Rema Hort Mann Foundation and was awarded an artist residency at The Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas in 2019.