Recognizing the depth and diversity of scholarship across the arts, humanities, and social sciences, several Tulane School of Liberal Arts faculty members have recently received prestigious fellowships. These awards will not only support their individual work, but enrich the broader academic and artistic communities they inhabit, expanding the impact of Tulane scholarship across disciplines.
Harlan Bozeman, Professor of Practice, Newcomb Department of Art
A prestigious honor recognizing exceptional creative achievement and impactful scholarship across the arts and academia, Bozeman joins the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation’s 101st class of fellows, following a legacy that includes artists and scholars such as James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, and the photographer Robert Frank. Bozeman, a multimedia artist and photographer, was selected for his work confronting the erasure of black legacies — work that blends photography, collage, and archival research while engaging in community-centered visual storytelling. His recent long-term project, Out the E, is a collaborative archive in Elaine, Arkansas, a town marked by a history of racial violence continuing to shape its present, with pieces on display in the Studio Museum in Harlem’s 6th annual “Freestyle” show, entitled “Fade.” At Tulane, Bozeman teaches courses like Decolonizing the Camera, a combination of photo history and studio practice, and a Photo I course that revives the practice of dark room photography.
Alexis Culotta, Senior Professor of Practice, Newcomb Department of Art
Digital Humanities Fellow at I Tatti
Roman art historian and author of The Frescoed Façade in Renaissance Roman Visual Culture (Amsterdam University Press, 2025), Culotta will travel to The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence to expand her scholarship on the frescoed and sgraffitoed façades of homes and other buildings in Renaissance Rome. The once-vibrant features of Rome’s streetscape now survive only in fragments — traces in deteriorating plaster, partial drawings, prints, and texts. Through her work with I Tatti and the Saving Faces database of more than 200 sites, Culotta combines art historical research with geospatial and digital humanities tools to create a publicly accessible digital archive that reconstructs and reconnects this urban visual culture across the Italian peninsula.
Kyle Decoste, Instructor, Newcomb Department of Music and Gender & Sexuality Studies
Charles Hiroshi Garrett Fellowship
Decoste is the recipient of this first-ever fellowship from the Society for American Music, named for a leading scholar who passed away suddenly in 2024. “It’s especially meaningful to hold a fellowship that memorializes Charles Hiroshi Garrett, a beloved scholar who shaped the study of American music in innumerable ways,” says Decoste. He and co-author Alex Blue V (McGill University) will utilize the fellowship to research their forthcoming book, an ethnographical examination of the “country rap” genre that explores issues of race, place, and sound in the United States. “While country rap is novel in some ways, the expropriation of Black art from Black musicians is actually a very old story. Country rap is just the next iteration,” comments Decoste, who plans to bring the research back to the classroom. “My hope is that students will see U.S. history anew and recognize the place music has in it.”
Michelle Foa, Associate Professor, Newcomb Art Department
Leonard A. Lauder Fellowship in Modern Art
Foa is the recipient of this Mid-Career fellowship from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, celebrating individuals whose work “collectively activates and uplifts 5,000 years of human creativity represented in The Met collection.” The 12-month fellowship will allow Foa to complete her book Edgar Degas and the Matter of Art (forthcoming from Yale University Press), while conducting research at the Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art housed within the museum. A scholar of European Art from the 18th century through the 20th century — with a particular focus on 19th-century French art, art culture, and criticism — Foa is also the author of Georges Seurat: The Art of Vision (2015, Yale University Press).
Allison Grossman, Assistant Professor, Political Science
Sciences Po-Université Paris Cité Fellowship
Grossman will spend a semester in Paris, France, continuing her research on individual and collective responses to disasters and climate change. The award supports faculty from the United States through a monthly stipend and access to an on-campus office space, library and university facilities, and a full program of research activities and events. “This opportunity offers sustained time to engage deeply in my research in a city I have loved since I studied in Paris as an undergraduate,” says Grossman. “I hope to use this opportunity to build relationships with scholars and policymakers working on related issues.” Grossman also plans to travel to West Africa, finalizing a book project on the disaster responses of poor states and conducting further research on the dynamics of climate change in the Sahel and West Africa.
Ilana Horowitz, Fields-Rayant Chair in Contemporary Jewish Life and Assistant Professor, Jewish Studies
2026 National Academy of Education (NAEd)/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellow
Out of a pool of nearly 500 scholars, Horowitz was one of 25 fellows selected by the NEAd as a leading scholar on educational research. The fellowship will allow her to continue work on a project entitled, “What Lasts Beyond the Diploma? A Longitudinal Study of Social Networks and Post-College Outcomes,” returning to a diverse cohort of 126 college students that she first studied from 2017–2021. Five years later, Horowitz will examine how the start of the first Trump administration and the COVID-19 pandemic affected the group’s post-graduation trajectories, both socially and professionally. “This project sits at the center of my work as a sociologist of education, religion, and inequality, weaving all three together to ask how identity shapes students' paths through higher education and beyond.”
Zachary Lazar, Professor, English
Fulbright in Romania Fellowship
As a Fulbright scholar, Zachary Lazar will head to Romania to trace his own Romanian Jewish roots while working on a postmodern novel about the experience. “I plan to stick close to the truth about my experience while there, but also to imagine my ancestors and what they might make of me going voluntarily to the country they fled,” comments Lazar, who is the author of six books, including Sway, Vengeance, and The Apartment on Calle Uruguay. Lazar often writes about his heritage, but sees this as his first opportunity to immerse himself in the politics and history of Eastern Europe. The Fulbright in Romania program, he adds, which was almost eliminated last year, affirms a commitment to the value of art and ideas, using government funding “to bring American literature to Romania and Romanian culture back to the United States.”
Karisma Price, Assistant Professor, English
Karisma Price — author of the poetry collection I'm Always So Serious (Sarabande Books, 2023) and winner of the 2025 Whiting Foundation Award in Poetry — joins the 2026 inaugural cohort of Writing Freedom Fellows, an initiative supported by the Mellon Foundation and Haymarket Books that aims to honor and uplift writers impacted by the criminal justice system. Price is at work on her second poetry collection, The New Book of Knowledge. “My work shows the power and necessity of Black kinship, the realities of living in a family affected by Hurricane Katrina, having a parent who was incarcerated during my youth, and the effects of living in the South under the thumb of white supremacy,” explains Price. “I believe my responsibility as a writer is to use my upbringing and lived experience to inform current and future generations.”
