{"id":207057,"date":"2026-04-23T10:30:58","date_gmt":"2026-04-23T10:30:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/207057\/"},"modified":"2026-04-23T10:30:58","modified_gmt":"2026-04-23T10:30:58","slug":"brooklyn-college-faculty-alum-named-2026-guggenheim-fellows-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/207057\/","title":{"rendered":"Brooklyn College Faculty, Alum Named 2026 Guggenheim Fellows"},"content":{"rendered":"

Brooklyn College proudly announces that Professor of History Karen B. Stern Gabbay<\/a>, Adjunct Professor of Sonic Arts Marina Rosenfeld, Adjunct Professor of English Madeleine Thien, and acclaimed alumna Haruna Lee \u201914 M.F.A. have been named recipients of the prestigious 2026 Guggenheim Fellowships.<\/p>\n

Lee is a\u00a0theater maker, educator, screenwriter and community steward based in Brooklyn. Lee\u2019s plays are often an urge to honor their mother\u2019s broken English, to translate experiences despite the gulf of cultures, to know their own psychic blood and guts, and to give up on words entirely and commune through epic imagery and ritual.<\/p>\n

Lee is a recipient of the Creative Capital Award for\u00a0DADBOT\u00a0(2026), the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize Finalist and Special<\/p>\n

\"Haruna<\/p>\n

Haruna Lee<\/p>\n

Commendation for\u00a049 Days\u00a0(2025), the Steinberg Playwright Award (2021), and the Obie Award for Playwriting and Conception for\u00a0Suicide Forest\u00a0(2019).\u00a0For TV, Lee has written for Apple TV+\u2019s\u00a0Pachinko\u00a0and HBO Max\u2019s\u00a0The Flight Attendant\u00a0and has developed multiple projects across television, film, and podcast.\u00a0Lee\u2019s writing has been published by Broadway Licensing, Yale\u2019s\u00a0Theater\u00a0Magazine, Table Work Press, and 53rd State Press.\u00a0Lee helmed the Brooklyn College M.F.A. Playwriting program between 2021 and 2023 and is currently teaching at Hunter College (CUNY) and Yale University.<\/p>\n

Lee is in the early stages of the project DADBOT, a hybrid technology-performance piece where Lee\u2019s deceased dad will be resurrected by using conversational AI to simulate the iconic father-child conversation.\u00a0The performance will be a mix of scripted and nonscripted improvisation between Lee and the AI that will feel a lot like a low-budget talk show where Lee receives the proverbial \u201cfatherly advice.\u201d\u00a0At the heart of this piece is Lee\u2019s yearning to understand the ties between fatherhood, rebelliousness, and romantic love. The Brooklyn College alumna hopes to capture a spiritual levity in \u201craising the dead\u201d while interrogating AI\u2019s application in grief work.<\/p>\n

Rosenfeld\u00a0is a composer and artist based in New York. Her works have been presented by institutions including the Park Avenue<\/p>\n

\"Marina<\/p>\n

Marina Rosenfeld<\/p>\n

Armory, the Museum of Modern Art, The Kitchen, the Serralves Foundation, and Portikus Frankfurt; festivals including Wien Modern, Donaueschinger Musiktage, Ultima, and the Holland Festival; and the Whitney, Montreal, PERFORMA, Son, and Gwangju biennials, among many others. She was awarded the Alpert Award in Visual Art in 2024.<\/p>\n

Her project \u201cNulls\u201d is hybrid in nature, linking work with generative sound and recorded media. It deals with research into the sonic and sculptural aftereffects of sound inscription. Thrilled to receive the honor, Rosenfeld\u00a0added she will use the fellowship as an open-ended time period for research and production.<\/p>\n

\"Karen<\/p>\n

Karen B. Stern Gabbay<\/p>\n

Stern is a respected scholar, educator, and award-winning author who has earned widespread recognition for her interdisciplinary work bridging history, material culture, and religious studies. She is author of Inscribing Devotion and Death: Archaeological Evidence for Jewish Populations of North Africa (Brill 2007) and Writing on the Wall: Graffiti and the Forgotten Jews of Antiquity (Princeton University Press 2018; 2020); winner of a 2020 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award; and co-editor of With the Loyal You Show Yourself Loyal (SBL Press, 2021). Her current book project considers Jewish history through the senses.<\/p>\n

Her Guggenheim Fellowship on the topic of \u201cSanctity: An Archaeology of the Senses in the Ancient Synagogue\u201d will support ongoing field and scientific research overseas, which aims to transform understandings of Jewish history through new interpretations of ancient objects and inscriptions associated with archaeological remains of synagogues, further solidifying her reputation as a leading voice in her field.<\/p>\n

Thien has taught literature and fiction in Canada, Hong Kong, Germany, Nigeria, the United States, Zimbabwe, and Singapore. From 2018 to 2024, she was a full professor of English at Brooklyn College, teaching primarily in the M.F.A. Program in Fiction.<\/p>\n

\"Madeleine<\/p>\n

Madeleine Thien<\/p>\n

Over the past 25 years, she has written about music, neurology, mathematics, physics, and philosophy, and about totalitarianism, protest, survival, and mourning. Her five books include the Booker-shortlisted novel Do Not Say We Have Nothing (Norton, 2016) and The Book of Records (2025), in which a girl and her father live in a building where different centuries wash in like the sea. She has been shortlisted for The Women\u2019s Prize for Fiction, The Folio Prize, The Climate Fiction Prize, The Tadeusz Bradecki Prize, and longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and a Carnegie Medal. She is a recipient of the Governor-General\u2019s Literary Award for Fiction, The Writers Trust of Canada Engel-Findley Award, and an Arts and Letters Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.<\/p>\n

Her current project, A Kind of Beginning, follows two sisters who leave Hong Kong and whose lives diverge. The novel is partly about the incandescence\u00a0of talent, how brightly it can burn, and how its light dims and transforms. Thien continues to teach as an adjunct professor and remains deeply connected to Brooklyn College\u2019s English Department and its students.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Brooklyn College proudly announces that Professor of History Karen B. Stern Gabbay, Adjunct Professor of Sonic Arts Marina…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":206780,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[98,100,99,82000,82001,82002,82003,9,24,63],"class_list":{"0":"post-207057","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-brooklyn","8":"tag-brooklyn","9":"tag-brooklyn-headlines","10":"tag-brooklyn-news","11":"tag-haruna-lee","12":"tag-karen-b-stern-gabbay","13":"tag-madeleine-thien","14":"tag-marina-rosenfeld","15":"tag-new-york","16":"tag-new-york-city","17":"tag-nyc"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207057","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=207057"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207057\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/206780"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=207057"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=207057"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=207057"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}