CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Two University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign professors have been awarded 2025 Guggenheim Fellowships.
This year’s Illinois fellows are history professor Kristin Hoganson and English professor Corey Van Landingham.
They are among 198 individuals working across 53 disciplines chosen through a rigorous peer-review process from nearly 3,500 applicants. The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowships are awarded to exceptional individuals in pursuit of scholarship in any field of knowledge and creation in any art form, under the freest possible conditions.
Hoganson’s project, “Infrastructural Power: U.S. Empire Building at the Dawn of the Big Carbon Era,” connects the history of infrastructure building to the growing footprints — political, economic, military and ecological — of the U.S. in the Caribbean area in the building boom years from the War of 1898 to the Wall Street crash of 1929. In addition to uncovering the magnitude and nature of U.S. involvement in transportation and electrification projects from Mexico to Venezuela and in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Haiti and the Dominican Republic, she considers how U.S. engineers — both private sector and military — advanced U.S. interests.
Her research highlights the role of civil engineering projects in displacing European rivals, extracting wealth, tying regional economies to the U.S. and enabling U.S. military access, white settlement and tourism. As a Guggenheim Fellow, she will continue to research how these projects affected daily lives, working conditions, labor movements, Indigenous communities, nationalist politics, ecologies and fossil fuel usage, with implications that continue to our own time.
Van Landingham’s project centers on the development of a poetry collection focusing on moments of exile, quarantine and other forms of isolation and solitude. These poems range from Venice’s quarantine measures during the Black Death to contemporary forest fire lookouts, from empty Zoom office hours to the 1,000-mile solo migration of OR-7, the first wild wolf seen in western Oregon since 1947. Across this work, she also plans to explore how meaningful engagement with seclusion and silence can reinforce individual thought and sustained meditation, particularly in an era saturated in literal and figurative noise: 24-hour news cycles, live-tweeting, the ship traffic interfering with whales’ echolocation.
On a research trip to Italy funded by an Illinois Campus Research Support Award, Van Landingham visited the ruins of the Villa Guilia on the tiny island where Julia the Elder — Augustus Caesar’s daughter — was exiled for five years. Part of Van Landingham’s project is to develop a series of poems spoken from her perspective and to write into the subjugation of other Roman women under the stultifying and isolating reign of pater familias.
Hoganson is the Stanley S. Stroup Professor of U.S. History and has affiliations in gender and women’s studies and the Center for Global Studies at Illinois. She was named a 2024 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow. A specialist in U.S. foreign relations history, she is the author of four books, most recently “The Heartland: An American History.”
Van Landingham is the author of “Antidote,” winner of the 2012 Ohio State University Press/The Journal Award in Poetry; “Love Letter to Who Owns the Heavens,” winner of the 2023 Levis Reading Prize; and most recently, “Reader, I” (2024). Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, The Best American Poetry, Boston Review and The New Yorker. A recipient of a NEA Creative Writing Fellowship and a Wallace Stegner Poetry Fellowship from Stanford University, she teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Illinois.
