C&S Fellows Win MacArthur Grants

Two Fellows from the Citizens & Scholars network have been named MacArthur Fellows, the five-year program unofficially called “Genius Grants.”  

P. Gabrielle Foreman, a 1986 Mellon Fellow, was awarded the grant for her work “catalyzing inquiry into historic nineteenth-century collective Black organizing efforts through initiatives such as the Colored Conventions Project.” Martha Gonzalez, a 2016 Career Enhancement Fellow, is recognized for “strengthening cross-border ties and advancing participatory methods of artistic knowledge production in the service of social justice.”

Dr. Foreman is the Paterno Family Professor of American Literature and Professor of African American Studies and History at Pennsylvania State University, where she is also the founding co-director of the Center for Black Digital Research/#DigBlk. As a literary historian and digital humanist, her vast body of work seeks to understand the collaborative production of knowledge. She is the founding director  of the Colored Conventions Project (CCP), a digital project that chronicles historic Black organizing efforts. This pubic facing project illuminates the Black political organizing efforts spanning 1830 until the 1890s when free and emancipated Black Americans came together in state and national conventions. 

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Dr. Gonzalez is an associate professor of Chicanx-Latinx Studies at Scripps College. The musician, scholar, and activist builds community through collaborative artistic expression. She is lead singer, songwriter, and percussionist in the East Los Angeles, Grammy Award-winning music collective Quetzal, which has brought the participatory principles of son jarocho and fandango to southern California. Her scholarly work explores the ways in which Chicano/a, Latino/a and other communities of color use music and other forms of creative expression as both a social commentary vehicle and as necessary tool for advancing social justice. 

As MacArthur Fellows, they each will receive $800,000, no-strings-attached, as seed money for their intellectual and social endeavors. The Career Enhancement Fellowship, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and administered by Citizens & Scholars, seeks to increase the presence of underrepresented junior and other faculty members in the humanities, social sciences, and arts by creating career development opportunities for selected Fellows with promising research projects. Multiple Career Enhancement Fellows have received MacArthur Grants in recent years, including Jacqueline Stewart, Monica Munoz Martinez, and Forrest Stuart.