Claremont McKenna College Professor Awarded Prestigious 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship

CLAREMONT— Claremont McKenna College Emerita Professor Nita Kumar has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, a highly competitive grant that invests in scholars, artists, scientists, writers, and cultural visionaries.

With her Guggenheim Fellowship, Kumar plans to research and write a social history of an urban upper middle class Kayastha family from 1911 to 2016 covering much of Uttar Pradesh. She will look at gender hierarchies, theorize change in 20th-century India, and present a contextualized discussion of the historian’s craft.

“The research will focus on the history of a woman known as Suniti and her upper middle class family at several levels, reflecting on how the story is impacted by the state of official and family archives, Indian notions of time and history, discourses of gender, caste and class,” said Kumar. “Over five generations, the members of Suniti’s family occupied the ranks of landowners, administrators, writers, judges, and advocates.”

Chosen through a rigorous application and peer review process from a pool of almost 3,000 applicants, the Class of 2024 Guggenheim Fellows was selected on the basis of prior career achievement. A number of the Fellows’ projects directly respond to issues of today such as democracy and politics, identity, disability activism, machine learning, incarceration, climate change, and community. Each fellow receives a monetary stipend to pursue independent work.

“I am honored to be one of this year’s Guggenheim Fellowship recipients,” said Kumar. “Throughout my career in writing and teaching, I have been interested in issues of how history is interpreted and written, and similarly as an anthropologist, I have focused on methodological issues. This grant is a culmination of my professional work to date and I look forward to delving deeper into the story of Suniti and her family.”

About Claremont McKenna College:
Claremont McKenna College is a private, 1,300-student residential liberal arts college located east of Los Angeles in Southern California. Since 1946, the College’s mission has been to prepare students for thoughtful and productive lives and responsible leadership in business, government, and the professions. Renowned for its Open Academy commitments to freedom of expression, viewpoint diversity, and constructive dialogue, as well as expertise in economics and government, Claremont McKenna also features an accomplished faculty of scholars and committed teachers in the humanities, sciences, and social sciences. Students are drawn to the College’s unparalleled offerings, including: 11 research institutes and centers; the ability to conduct research one-on-one with faculty; and access to leaders, artists, and visionaries who engage with students at the Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum. Claremont McKenna is a member of The Claremont Colleges. For more information, visit https://www.cmc.edu/.