Two Arizona State University professors and a university alumnus have been named 2025 Guggenheim Fellows.
Regents Professor Sir Jonathan Bate, English Professor of Practice Larissa Fasthorse and English alumnus Brandon D. Som are part of the Guggenheim Foundation’s 100th class of fellows, who are selected based on prior career achievement and exceptional promise.
Bate, Fasthorse and Som were chosen out of a pool of nearly 3,500 applicants, and each will receive a monetary stipend to pursue their work over the next year.
“Seeing this enormous honor come to two current faculty members and an alumnus all at once highlights the fact that ASU's Department of English is among the finest in the nation,” said Manushag “Nush” Powell, chair and professor of English at ASU. “Our faculty embrace true excellence in research and creative endeavors. Professors Bate and FastHorse pursue greatness in their work so that their students will be inspired to do the same.”
Bate, who was awarded in the category of literary criticism, called the Guggenheim award “very special.”
“You look around at the distinguished people over the years who have had them, and just to be in the company with such great scholars and creative artists means a lot,” said Bate, who is a world-renowned expert in Shakespeare and sustainability, and in 2015 became the youngest person ever to have been knighted for services to literary scholarship.
“And I think one of the things that’s really special about Guggenheim is that it’s not only for academics, but also for creatives. My own work has always been at the intersection between academic study and the creative arts. So, Guggenheim feels a particularly good fit for that.”
Bate said he will use his stipend to research, write and complete two books.
The first, titled “The Garden: A Green History,” is about the ideas and images of gardens in art, literature and religious thinking from, as Bate put it, the Garden of Eden to the Manhattan High Line.
“The argument of the book is that we often think of the natural world and human culture as being two things that are apart and in some sense in opposition to each other,” Bate said. “But it seems to me that throughout history and across cultures, the garden is most people’s kind of first encounter with green things of nature, whether it’s a city park, a suburban garden of even a window box in an apartment."
Bate’s second book, titled “The Planetary Imagination,” will examine how writers and creative artists have thought about the planet and the relationship between humans and the environment.
Fasthorse, who was awarded the first fellowship in Indigenous studies from the Dorothy Tapper Goldman Foundation, will use her stipend to continue the work she’s been doing in adapting a play from the novel, “Oroonoko,” which was published in 1688 and authored by Aprha Behn.
The novel, recognized as one of the earliest English novels, is a work of prose fiction about an African prince who is tricked into slavery and sold to European colonists in Suriname.
Fasthorse said she was encouraged by Ayanna Thompson, an ASU Regents Professor and executive director of the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, to adapt the novel.
“She thought there were a lot of interesting things for an adaptation that fit into my voice and the work I do,” said Fasthorse, who is a 2020 MacArthur Fellow and award-winning writer, choreographer and co-founder of Indigenous Direction, a consulting company for Indigenous arts and audiences. “It’s interesting to think about the intersection of identities, how Indigenous folk interacted with immigrants, how they affected each other and how that resonates today.
“Plus, this was one of the first English novels written by a woman, and that was exciting to me. To be able to say how we look at the Renaissance era, the way women and people from different backgrounds viewed their world, and how does that echo in New Amsterdam (New York) and how does that echo today … my work is so much about that.”
Fasthorse (Sicangu Lakota Nation), who is working on the adaptation with ASU English Professor and director Michael Garcés, said she hopes the first draft of the play will be completed over the summer.
Som, awarded in the category of poetry, won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for poetry for his collection titled “Tripas: Poems,” which addresses his Mexican and Chinese heritages and lineages.
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