Inspired by UC Berkeley Professor Frances Hellman and started at UC Berkeley and UC San Diego, the Hellman Fellows Fund provides much needed support to pre-tenure assistant professors who have served for at least two years. Established in 1995, the Hellman Fellows Program has since expanded to include all ten UC campuses and a handful of private institutions.
Over 2,000 faculty have received the fellowship and have cited the important boost it gave to their advancement to tenure. Between 2019 and 2023 eleven Arts and Humanities professors received the fellowship: Lilla Balint (German), Carmine-Emanuele Cella (Music), Atreyee Gupta (History of Art), Kenyatta Hinkle (Art Practice), Vasugi Kailasam (South and Southeast Asian Studies), Asma Kazmi (Art Practice), Andrew Leong (English), Nasser Meerkhan (Spanish and Portuguese), Fumi Okiji (Rhetoric), Maria Sonevytsky (Music), and Nathaniel Wolfson (Spanish and Portuguese).
Fellowship funds for these faculty supported everything from archival research and building intellectual community to music recordings integrating augmented instruments and 3-D spatialization and the first theatrical presentation in over a century of the earliest known play in English by an Asian immigrant in the United States.
According to Vasugi Kailasam, fellowships like this are vital for early-career scholars, especially in the humanities, where exploring postcolonial cultural histories often involves tracking down materials in far-flung archives. The opportunity to examine, in Singapore, ephemera such as “newspapers and little magazines, which are central to the project and often difficult to find elsewhere” led to both her currently in-process second book project on contemporary Tamil literature in Southeast Asia and the completion of The Tamil Realist Novel in South and Southeast Asia, the book project for which she was awarded the Hellman Fellowship.
Like Kailasam, Andrew Leong’s research proved fruitful not only for the project for which he applied, but also his next project. At the prompting of the Hellman Fellows program, Leong did something he would not have normally done and translated and produced a staged reading of The Ones Who Leave, the only surviving play of Nagahara Hideaki, a Los Angeles-based author who wrote for a Japanese language audience in the mid-1920s. That staging, along with his staging of Osadda’s Revenge by Sadakichi Hartmann shortly thereafter, convinced him that there is enough material for him to write a book on drama written by authors living in the United States between the opening of mass Japanese emigration in 1885 and the ban on Japanese immigration imposed by the Immigration Act of 1924. This exploration expanded his understanding of these authors as multi-genre writers and gave him new perspectives on specific works, especially Hartmann’s 1894 Conversations with Walt Whitman.
In addition to helping bridge research from one project to the next, the Hellman proved invaluable for making connections with scholars at other institutions and in adjacent fields. As a result of travel funded by the Hellman fellowship, Leong found a trove of play manuscripts in a Los Angeles archive, likely the only surviving ones from that period. Nasser Meerkhan timed his application to coincide with a sabbatical which allowed him to spend significant time in Spain meeting colleagues and visiting a number of different archives. These visits allowed him to finish a few chapters of his forthcoming 2025 book, Muses to Makers: Women Writers of Medieval Iberia, giving him a good outline to send to publishers. Like Kailasam, Meerkhan underscored the importance of the fellowship for junior faculty and its ability to help bring a solid project idea to completion.
Arts faculty have also benefited from the Hellman fellowship. Carmine-Emanuele Cella was able to produce a monographic recording of his compositions featuring cutting-edge technologies developed with the help of the fellowship, including augmented instruments and 3-D spatialization, and to fund the American tour of the French ensemble L’Itinéraire, featuring music composed by him and his students. The tour also helped strengthen connections between UC Berkeley and the French spectral music community, connections which continue to bear fruit. Asma Kazmi’s fellowship helped create new work that will be on view in a solo exhibition at the Beall Center for Art and Technology in Irvine in 2027. She will also be starting a 2-year residency at the Beall Center this year as part of their Black Box Residency Projects series, focused on collaborative work between artists and UC Irvine research departments.
Faculty eligible for the Hellman Fellowship will be contacted by the office of the Vice Provost for Faculty. Applications will be due in spring.