Franke Visiting Fellows

Michael Kimmelman is an American author, critic, New York Times columnist, and pianist and was the 2014 Franke Visiting Fellow at the Whitney Humanities Center. In the lecture "The Politics of Public Space," given on April 2, 2014, he discusses the politics of occupying and designing public spaces in a neoliberal age. Kimmelman describes the formation and functioning of recent, popular movements in relation to public spaces in New York, Cairo, Istanbul, and the West Bank while interrogating the role of architecture in serving justice and enhancing human possibilities.

For twelve years, Augenbraum was Executive Director of the National Book Foundation, presenter of the National Book Awards. He has translated, among other works, Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s Chronicle of the Narváez Expedition and the Filipino novelist José Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo. In 2012, the University of Texas Press published his co-translation (with Ilan Stavans) of The Plain in Flames by Juan Rulfo; in 2013, Penguin Classics published his edition of the Collected Poems of Marcel Proust. He is currently carrying out a research project on the business of translation in the United States under a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. In 2015, Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota, awarded him the degree of Doctor of Humane Letters, honoris causa.

A historian and theorist of digital media, Geoghegan is a senior lecturer in Media and Communications at Coventry University and a visiting associate professor in Film and Media Studies at Yale University. He also works as a curator and educational programmer for the Anthropocene Project at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, Germany. His research investigates how changes in media technology interweave with changes in popular culture, science, and the physical environment. He has edited essay collections on media philosopher Gilbert Simondon, on media and the occult, and on media theorist Friedrich Kittler. Geoghegan’s essays and translations appear in journals including Critical Inquiry, SubStance, IEEE Annals on the History of Computing, and Theory, Culture & Society. He is currently writing a book with Francesco Casetti on screening as a cultural technique that examines the history of managing environments and space through screen-based media technologies such as radar and global

Hilton Als is a staff writer and chief theater critic at The New Yorker. He is the author of two acclaimed works of nonfiction that explore gender, race, and identity: The Women (1996) and White Girls (2013), which was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the Lambda Literary Award. Als received a Windham-Campbell Prize for Literature in 2016 and the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2017. A former fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation, Als is an associate professor in the writing program at Columbia University. He has also taught at Yale, Wellesley, Wesleyan, and Smith.

The Franke Visiting Fellow Lecture with Steven Meyer, Washington University "The Two Silos: Literature, Science, and Agents of Overlap in Twenty-first-century Science Studies" Steven Meyer teaches English and American literature and modern intellectual history at Washington University in St. Louis, where he specializes in twentieth- and twenty-first-century poetry, literature, and science. He is the author of Irresistible Dictation: Gertrude Stein and the Correlations of Writing and Science and editor of The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Science. His current book project, Robust Empiricisms: Jamesian Modernism between the Disciplines, 1878 to the Present, examines a cross-disciplinary tradition that derives from psychologist and philosopher William James and mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead and reaches from speculative philosophy to science studies, evolutionary developmental biology to literary criticism, and neurophysiology to poetry and fiction. Meyer is

This talk will examine the life and thought of Salo Baron, one of the great twentieth-century historians who was among the first to bring Jewish Studies to the American university. The talk will trace Baron’s commitment to rebutting the so-called lachrymose conception of Jewish history by emphasizing the theme of survival, but it will also examine that critique in the context of Holocaust memory that gradually began to emerge after the Second World War. James McAuley is a contributing columnist for The Washington Post writing on European affairs. During his Franke Fellowship at the Whitney, he is continuing research on his next book, “Black Milk of Dawn.” While at Yale, he will also be finishing a short biography of the Zionist benefactor Edmond de Rothschild, for the Jewish Lives biography series at Yale University Press. This follows the publication in 2021 of his first book, The House of Fragile Things: Jewish Art Collectors and the Fall of France, also with Yale University Press. H

How are power structures and empathy implicated in translation? What do we owe asylum seekers, and the stories they bring? What does it mean to bear witness, or to take action? Based on her experiences as an observer and translator in different parts of the U.S. immigration system, Alejandra Oliva reflects on the ways, both big and small, that the system fails the people within it—and the shift required to fix it. Alejandra Oliva is an essayist, embroiderer, and translator working in immigration advocacy. Her writing has been included in Best American Travel Writing 2020, nominated for a Pushcart prize, and helped her secure an Aspen Summer Words Emerging Writers Fellowship. She is the translator for a bilingual edition of A Is for Asylum Seeker by Rachel Ida Buff (2020, Fordham University Press). Her nonfiction chapbook, Declaration, was published by Guillotine Books (2016). She holds a Master of Theological Studies degree from Harvard Divinity School and works as a communications coo

Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi Wednesday, March 26, 2025 2025 Franke Visiting Fellow Lecture at the Whitney Humanities Center Welcome: Cajetan Iheka, Director, Whitney Humanities Center Introduction: Stephanie Newell, Professor of English Jennifer Makumbi introduces her forthcoming pan-African novel,Alkebulan: When the Lions Returned, followed by a reading and discussion. JenniferNansubugaMakumbiisaUgandan fiction writerand authorofTheFirst Woman(A GirlIs a Body of WaterinUS/Canada), Kintu, andManchester Happened(Let’sTell This Story ProperlyinUS/Canada). As Franke Visiting Fellow at the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale (2024–25), she is completing her pan-African novel,Alkebulan: When the Lions Returned. Sheis arecipient of theprestigiousWindham-Campbell Prize(2018).She alsowon the GlobalCommonwealth Short story prizein2014.She has aPh.D.from Lancaster University and has taught in several universities intheUnited Kingdom. Cosponsored by Yale MacMillan Center Council on African Studies