Two faculty members in the University of Notre Dame’s College of Arts & Letters have been awarded fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation as part of its 100th class of honorees.

Thomas Burman, the Robert M. Conway Director of the Medieval Institute and a professor of history, and Karen Graubart, a professor in the Department of History, are two of the 198 scholars, scientists, and artists chosen based on their prior career achievement and exceptional promise.

The Guggenheim Foundation has granted more than $400 million in fellowships to more than 19,000 people over the past century, including members of national academies, Pulitzer Prize winners, and more than 125 Nobel laureates.

“We are thrilled to see two of our scholars receive this prestigious recognition from the Guggenheim Foundation,” said Ernest Morrell, associate dean for the humanities and equity and the Coyle Professor of Literacy Education. “This support for their work is testament to their groundbreaking scholarship and insightful analysis, and it underscores the strength and caliber of the research done throughout our history department.”

Engaging the religious other

Burman will use his fellowship to finish a book he’s been working on for more than a decade, tentatively titled “Beyond the Mediterranean: The Intellectual Venture of Ramon Martí.”

Martí, a 13th-century Dominican friar, wrote enormous works exploring and refuting Judaism. He also wrote shorter works directed at Islam, which was unusual for a medieval Latin European scholar.

“This book is an attempt to take in the full arc of Martí’s career and also — maybe more significantly — to place it in a broader intellectual context than he’s been looked at in before,” Burman said.

Burman, the past recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, has spent most of his career examining interactions across religious divides during the Middle Ages.

“There’s a lot of interesting research about what ordinary people in medieval Europe thought about Judaism and Islam,” Burman said. “But I’ve always been most interested in what the people who know the other religions best think about these religions. How do they engage this religious other?”

Burman’s research will also be aided by his recently awarded membership at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, and he will spend the next year there working on his book and collaborating with other medievalists in his cohort.

“Both of these recognitions have been aspirations that, for most of my career, seemed well beyond me,” he said. “So I’m equally delighted to be spending a year there.”

Self-representation in the African diaspora

In “Making Malambo: Free Black Collectivity in Early Spanish America,” historian Graubart will examine how a free African-descent community in colonial Panama represented itself in conversation with Spanish officials.

In the late 16th century, Spanish King Philip II imposed a new tax on all free Black people and people with mixed African heritage within the empire. In response, the targeted community in Panama organized a collective petition detailing their challenges and accomplishments.

“My work provides ways to think about not only what kind of work they did, and how they were overlooked by so many, but also what kind of influence they were able to exercise over these proceedings,” Graubart said.

Graubart — who is also a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, and whose work has been previously supported by the NEH and the American Council of Learned Societies — will travel during her fellowship year to both Peru and Panama to scour archives that may be relevant to her research.

She is particularly interested in Catholic archives, as she recently received the Cyprian Davis, O.S.B., Prize from the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism, in partnership with the American Catholic Historical Association, to research Black Catholicism.

“The Catholic Church provided semi-autonomous spaces for enslaved and free people to organize for worship and festivals, including in Panama,” she said. “So I will be thinking about how Catholicism might have shaped their collectivity.”

Continuing a legacy

The College of Arts & Letters’ Franco Family Institute for Liberal Arts and the Public Good offers support to faculty across the arts, humanities, and social sciences in applying for major national and international fellowships, including the Guggenheim.

With the addition of Burman and Graubart, 24 Arts & Letters faculty members have won Guggenheims in the last 25 years.

In 2024, Notre Dame awardees were Barbara Montero, the Rev. John A. O’Brien Professor of Philosophy; Program of Liberal Studies professor Gretchen Reydams-Schils; and associate professor of English Roy Scranton.

“Our faculty continue to demonstrate a broad and urgent commitment to the public good of scholarship in the liberal arts,” said Kate Marshall, director of the Franco Institute and associate dean for research and strategic initiatives. “Thomas and Karen are the two latest examples of critical work done throughout the College to expand our understanding of the past in a way that vitally informs our present.”

Originally published by Adah McMillan at al.nd.edu on April 24, 2025.