24\u00a0Andrew Carnegie fellows selected in 2026<\/a> from a pool of more than 381 nominees. He said that receiving the fellowship for his project, \u201cBeyond Nostalgia and Despair: Storytelling and Polarization in American Democracy,\u201d is a meaningful honor that will enable a period of sustained research and writing.<\/p>\n\u201cThe central aim of my research is to better understand why contemporary political polarization is so persistent, even when citizens seemingly share overlapping commitments to democratic ideals,\u201d said Rogers, who joined the Brown faculty in 2017.<\/p>\n
The fellowship will support archival research and writing and enable Rogers to organize conferences that bring scholars together to examine how civic storytelling shapes democratic life. He describes civic storytelling as the practice of creating and using shared narratives \u2014 for example, telling a story about the founding of the United States as a promise of freedom to define national identity.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy view is that political divisions are not simply a matter of disagreement over policy but are anchored in deeper narratives about who we are as a political community, what we owe one another and who counts as one of us,\u201d Rogers said. \u201cOur highest ideals are carried in these stories, distinguishing friends and enemies within, constraining the reach of our ideas and limiting their potential.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rogers\u2019 ongoing political science research is centered around what he describes as a \u201csimple but demanding concern: What kinds of people must we be \u2014 in thought and practice \u2014 to meet the demands of democratic life?\u201d<\/p>\n
His scholarship engages historical and philosophical figures of American political thought who have offered responses to that question. Rogers\u2019 2023 book \u201cThe Darkened Light of Faith: Race, Democracy and Freedom in African American Political Thought,\u201d examined the faith African Americans have placed in democracy despite experiencing conditions of injustice. He is also the author of \u201cThe Undiscovered Dewey: Religion, Morality and the Ethos of Democracy\u201d about American philosopher, psychologist and educational reformer John Dewey. He has also edited several volumes of essays, including \u201cAfrican American Political Thought: A Collected History.\u201d<\/p>\n
The\u00a0Carnegie fellowships<\/a> are awarded to scholars annually to support high-caliber research in the humanities and social sciences that addresses important issues confronting society across complex political, economic, technological, humanistic and sociological topics. Selected from a record number of nominees, the 2026 fellows include 12 scholars from public U.S. universities, 11 scholars from private U.S. universities, and one scholar from a public university in Canada.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] \u2014 Melvin Rogers, a professor of political science at Brown University, has received a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":625378,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,3,21,19,22,20,25,24],"class_list":["post-625377","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","tag-america","tag-news","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/625377","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=625377"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/625377\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/625378"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=625377"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=625377"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=625377"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}