Last week, the 2025 participants in the Guggenheim Fellowship, one of the world’s most prestigious awards for work in the humanities, were announced. Of the 198 2025 Guggenheim Fellows, five recipients are Oberlin alumni: Josh Faught, OC ’01; David Getsy, OC ’95; Elizabeth Otto, OC ’94; Huang Ruo, OC ’00; and Bijal Pravin Trivedi, OC ’92. Their practices span visual art production, art history research projects, science journalism, and music.
Guggenheim Fellows Getsy and Otto both studied art history while at Oberlin and have continued to work in the field ever since. The Guggenheim fellowship will allow both of the scholars to dedicate the necessary time to their respective book projects.
“The fellowship will provide support for a book I’m writing on queer performance in the streets of ’70s New York City,” Getsy wrote in an email to the Review. “I’m investigating how public performances about the life of the street related to the social and political debates of the early LGBT rights movement in the wake of the Stonewall uprising in 1969. The project is based on interviews with surviving performers, writers, artists, and viewers of these ephemeral public artworks.”
Otto’s book will build off of her specialization in Bauhaus, the German art school that operated from 1919 to 1933. Otto’s most recent book, Haunted Bauhaus, focuses on the school’s largely unknown engagement with occult spirituality, gender fluidity, queer identities, and radical politics. The fellowship will support Otto’s next book, which will uncover Bauhaus members who were victims of the Holocaust or joined the Nazi party.
“It’s really exciting because it also reflects a lot of the questions we’re having to ask ourselves now, like, ‘What happens if you are under fascist government?’” Otto said. “We see Bauhaus members coming together in unexpected and even terrifying constellations. … [Former Bauhaus director] Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was Austrian and joined the Nazi Party once Austria was annexed. He joined the SS and was among the main architects of Auschwitz. He was in charge of construction of gas chambers and crematoria, where seven of his Bauhaus colleagues were murdered. So it’s super dark stuff, but it’s really important to think about how design serves a regime, how designers resisted, and to bring back those designers who’ve been written out of history because they were dead when histories of the movement were being written.”
Faught’s project involves the longest-running American soap opera, Days of Our Lives. The project began when Faught found an online listing for 46 DVDs of the show — cut into a single super cut. Faught was inspired by the anonymous vendor’s tedious tracing of the narrative arc of Will Horton and Sonny Kiriakis, the series’s first same-sex couple.
“[The works are] somewhere in between a viewing station, a painting, and a textile,” Faught said. “There are videos embedded in these objects, which are sculptural paintings that sit on the wall. There’s usually a crocheted textile that’s been painted or dyed and stitched onto the linen, and then I work with a furniture maker to create embedded cabinets within the piece that contain small video monitors that play all of the video footage on a loop.”
Oberlin’s unique liberal arts education seems to have set many of these scholars and artists up for the kind of interdisciplinary practice that is often supported by prestigious fellowships like the Guggenheim.
Trivedi will use the fellowship to write a book that has already been in the works, tracing the story of sickle cell disease across three continents. The story will take place in the U.S., India, and Nigeria and will follow the mutation from when it first arose 7,300 years ago to the present day.
Trivedi studied biochemistry while a student at Oberlin. It wasn’t until beginning the doctorate track that Trivedi realized her strength was really in telling stories, and she had a unique ability to translate the science. She then shifted gears, pursuing a master’s in science journalism, and has since written at some of the top science journals, as well as her first book Breath from Salt.
“There was actually a professor at Oberlin, Carol Tufts [professor emeritus of English], who really encouraged me to get an English major,” Trivedi said. “[Tufts] said to me, ‘You know, you could write for science magazines, like Scientific American,’ and I just wish I’d had the courage to take her advice at that point. At that point, I couldn’t imagine having a non-science career, but she understood something about me that I didn’t understand until maybe 15 years later, and I never got to tell her that. You know, when I wrote an article for Scientific American, I was like, ‘Oh, my God, she saw my future and I did not.’”
Some of this year’s Guggenheim Fellows have overlapped with current faculty.
“I studied with Pipo [Nguyen-Duy, professor of Studio Art and Photography] when he first got to Oberlin, and he actually was really instrumental in giving me the confidence to be a visual artist in the first place,” Faught said. “I think I just took that class as an elective, but it was something that I was genuinely interested in. I remember Pipo looking at my work and saying, ‘I feel like you’re after this queer sensibility that isn’t easily located, but is somewhere in the work itself.’ This was the first college-level photography class I’d ever taken, and the fact that he had taken me so seriously and found this thing in my work that I couldn’t really articulate just really set the gears in motion.”
Current faculty, like Mildred C. Jay Professor of Medieval Art History Erik Inglis, OC ’89, also remembers members of this cohort fondly. Inglis is known for providing resources for students graduating with degrees in the arts and sharing news of Oberlin alumni achievements over the years.
“Taken as a group, the five alums receiving the Guggenheim this year demonstrate exceptional range, innovation, and creativity,” Inglis wrote in a statement to the Review. “And this reminds me of our current students which, in turn, makes me look forward to the day — 25 to 30 years in the future — when we’ll read about some of 2025’s graduates receiving the Guggenheim and continuing this tradition.”
