University of Massachusetts professors Stephen Platt, history, and Juana Valdés, art, have been awarded prestigious 2026 Guggenheim Fellowships by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. 

Image

The 223 members of the 101^st class of Guggenheim Fellows, announced on April 14, work across 55 disciplines. They are chosen through a rigorous application and peer-review process from a pool of nearly 5,000 applicants based on both prior career achievement and “exceptional promise,” the foundation said, adding that each Fellow receives a monetary stipend to pursue a project that is meaningful to them under “the freest possible conditions.”

“Congratulations to Stephen Platt and Juana Valdés, both of the UMass Amherst College of Humanities and Fine Arts, for being named 2026 Guggenheim Fellows in recognition of their career achievements and future promise,” said Fouad Abd-El-Khalick, provost and senior vice chancellor for academic affairs. “Their exceptional contributions to their respective fields of history and art advance the common good on a national and global scale and we are proud they are members of our faculty community.”

"Congratulations to Stephen Platt and Juana Valdés on this well-deserved recognition,” said Maria del Guadalupe Davidson, dean of the College of Humanities and Fine Arts. “The Guggenheim Fellowship is one of the most competitive honors in American intellectual and creative life and having both of them recognized this year speaks to the depth of scholarship and creative work happening right here at UMass."

Platt is an award-winning historian of modern China who explores the cultural, intellectual and military aspects of China’s encounters with the wider world in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. 

“It’s an incredible and humbling honor,” he said of receiving the Fellowship. “I work on Chinese history, which is not a mainstream field, and it means a lot to have the endorsement of the Guggenheim Foundation and the scholars who served as judges this year. It’s an amazing feeling to be able to look forward to a year off from all my other duties so I can focus entirely on research and writing for my next book.”

Image

Valdés, associate professor of printmaking and an exhibiting artist for more than 30 years, melds ceramics, printmaking, and sculpture to explore Afro-Latinx diaspora. 

“As a practicing artist working across civic, academic and international contexts, I understand my work as more than creative production; it is a form of historical intervention,” said Valdés. “My trajectory as an artist has been shaped by the convergence of multiple identities: Cuban-born, Afro-Latinx, woman, immigrant, educator, and conceptual artist. I have developed a practice grounded in the archival poetics of material culture, postcolonial critique, and diasporic memory. Through installations, public works, and sculpture, I create living archives that excavate histories of migration, memory, labor, and resistance embedded within the materials of everyday life. My practice remains visually expansive, politically engaged, and deeply rooted in diasporic experience. I am deeply honored to be named a Guggenheim Fellow.”

“Our new class of Guggenheim Fellows is representative of the world’s best thinkers, innovators, and creators in art, science, and scholarship,” said Edward Hirsch, award-winning poet and President of the Guggenheim Foundation. “As the Foundation enters its second century and looks to the future, I feel confident that this new class of 223 individuals will do bold and inspiring work, undaunted by the challenges ahead. We are honored to support their visionary contributions.” 

Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina, the Paul Murray Kendall Chair in Biography and emerita professor of English at UMass Amherst, was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2023. 

Since its founding in 1925 by Senator Simon Guggenheim, the Foundation has awarded nearly $450 million in fellowships to more than 19,000 Fellows, among whom are more than 125 Nobel laureates, members of all the national academies, winners of the Pulitzer Prize, Fields Medal, Turing Award, Bancroft Prize, National Book Award and other internationally recognized honors.