Inspired by UC Berkeley Professor Frances Hellman and started at UC Berkeley and UC San Diego, the Hellman Fellows Fund(link is external) provides much needed support to pre-tenure assistant professors who have served for at least two years. Established in 1995, the Hellman Fellows Program has since expanded to include all ten UC campuses and a handful of private institutions.
Over 2,000 faculty have received the fellowship and have cited the important boost it gave to their advancement to tenure. Between 2019 and 2023 eleven Arts and Humanities professors received the fellowship: Lilla Balint (German), Carmine-Emanuele Cella (Music), Atreyee Gupta (History of Art), Kenyatta Hinkle (Art Practice), Vasugi Kailasam (South and Southeast Asian Studies), Asma Kazmi (Art Practice), Andrew Leong (English), Nasser Meerkhan (Spanish and Portuguese), Fumi Okiji (Rhetoric), Maria Sonevytsky (Music), and Nathaniel Wolfson (Spanish and Portuguese).
Fellowship funds for these faculty supported everything from archival research and building intellectual community to music recordings integrating augmented instruments and 3-D spatialization and the first theatrical presentation(link is external) in over a century of the earliest known play in English by an Asian immigrant in the United States.
According to Vasugi Kailasam, fellowships like this are vital for early-career scholars, especially in the humanities, where exploring postcolonial cultural histories often involves tracking down materials in far-flung archives. The opportunity to examine, in Singapore, ephemera such as “newspapers and little magazines, which are central to the project and often difficult to find elsewhere” led to both her currently in-process second book project on contemporary Tamil literature in Southeast Asia and the completion of The Tamil Realist Novel in South and Southeast Asia, the book project for which she was awarded the Hellman Fellowship.