Two University of Michigan scholars have received the prestigious 2025 Guggenheim Fellowships for their distinguished achievements and exceptional promise for future accomplishment.
Professors Benjamin Brose and Martin Murray were among 198 individuals from the United States and Canada working across 53 disciplines appointed for the 100th class of fellows, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has announced.
“We believe that these creative thinkers can take on the challenges we all face today and guide our society towards a better and more hopeful future,” said Edward Hirsch, president of the Guggenheim Foundation.
Brose is a professor of Chinese and Buddhist studies and chair of the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures. His work focuses on the history of Buddhism in China and cultural exchange in East Asia.
Brose’s project is on the extraordinary record of Gao Henian (1872-1962), a 19-year-old scion of a wealthy family. In winter 1890, Gao set off on a months-long pilgrimage across China. Leaving behind his family, nascent career and newly married wife, Gao traveled thousands of miles on foot to visit a succession of Buddhist and Daoist mountains and meet with the eminent monks and adepts who lived there.
This was the first in a succession of long, often arduous pilgrimages that would occupy him for the next 35 years. During that time, Gao visited nearly every significant Buddhist site in mainland China, bearing witness to one of the most transformative periods of modern Chinese history.
He befriended many of the leading clerics of his generation, became an influential advocate for an embattled Buddhist community, and, later, worked on behalf of ordinary Chinese citizens suffering the deprivations of natural disasters, foreign occupation and civil war.
Thankfully, according to Brose, Gao also had the foresight to write it all down. His lengthy travelogue offers an intimate, eyewitness account of life in China spanning the final decades of the Qing dynasty through the Republican period.
“At a time when scholarship and research are under attack, I am tremendously grateful to have received this generous support from the Guggenheim Foundation,” Brose said. “This fellowship will make it possible for me to devote the next year to work on a new book project focused on the lives of Buddhist monastics and laypeople in China during the transformative and tumultuous period from 1860 to 1960. I’m looking forward to conducting new research in China, Taiwan and Japan.”
Murray is a professor of urban planning in the A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning and focuses on global urbanism and Johannesburg in particular. He is also an adjunct professor in the Department of Afroamerican and African studies and professor of sociology in LSA.
Murray’s current research engages the fields of urban studies and planning, global urbanism, cultural geography, distressed urbanism, development, historical sociology and African studies.
Specifically, he focuses on two fields of inquiry: the trajectories of global urbanism at the start of the 21st century, and the turn toward master-planned, holistically designed “private cities” built from scratch, especially those currently under construction or in the planning stages in urban Africa.
“My thoughts about becoming a Guggenheim Fellow? I am quite honored,” Murray said. “I have spent a long academic career doing what I love to do and what I am drawn to do — exploring squatted apartment blocks in Johannesburg, driving around with the police on night patrols, tramping through informal settlements in Nairobi and Maputo, or trying to make sense of the straitened economic circumstances in Detroit.
“I have gained a great deal of personal satisfaction with exploring out-of-the-way places and the people who inhabit them. It is an honor that the Guggenheim Fellowship people have considered what I am doing worthy of recognition.”
Murray’s fellowship project is to continue research and writing on what happens to leftover spaces after abandonment in deindustrializing Detroit. With colleagues Maria Arquero de Alarcon and Olaia Chivite, he began several years ago to investigate five distressed neighborhoods in Detroit.
These neighborhoods are characterized by high levels of vacancy, abandonment, foreclosures, population shrinkage, a severely restricted market for housing and diminished municipal services.
“In this Guggenheim project, I am trying to make sense of the historical specificity of urban decline and abandonment in Detroit, a city that began unraveling after the ‘boom years’ of the 1950s,” Murray said.
The fellows were chosen through a rigorous application and peer review process from a pool of nearly 3,500 applicants. Each fellow receives a monetary stipend to pursue independent work at the highest level under “the freest possible conditions.”
Since its founding in 1925, the Guggenheim Foundation has awarded over $400 million in fellowships to more than 19,000 fellows.
