The Rifkind Center Fellowship gives recipients the opportunity to have a full semester free of teaching in order to work on a research or creative project.

Rifkind Fellowship recipients

2025 - 26 Chad Kidd (Philosophy) & Thomas Thayer (Art)
2024 - 25 Kedon Willis (English) & Harold Veeser (English)
2023 - 24  Lale Can (History) & Hajoe Moderegger  (Art)
2022 - 23 Robert Higney (English) & Abby Kornfeld (Art History) 
2021 - 22  Elise Crull (Philosophy) & Lyn Di Iorio (English)
2020 - 21 Molly Aitken (Art) & Craig Daigle (History)
2019 - 20 Elik Elhanan (FLL) & Barbara Nadeo (History)
2018 - 19 Harriet Senie (Art)
2017 - 18 Amr Kamal (FLL)
2016 - 17 Andreas Killen (History)
2015 - 16 Andrea Weiss (Film)

Examples of work supported by the fellowship

2025 - 2026

Chad Kidd
Associate Professor of Philosophy
Fayez Sayegh, Philosopher and Activist

Chad Kidd will devote the period of his fellowship to working on a project about the little-known thinker Fayez Sayegh, a significant figure within a largely forgotten group of existentialist intellectuals and artists that developed across the Arab-speaking world in the 1940s–1960s. The attraction to existentialism among Arab thinkers was due in part to the liberatory potential that they, like Frantz Fanon, saw in it at the time. For Sayegh, however, the interest was primarily due to its potential for a liberatory philosophical humanism that could operate both as a theoretical and practical framework for ameliorative methodological and social-political change. The aim of Kidd’s project is to help place Fayez Sayegh on the map as a philosopher by articulating his philosophical positions and charting their relevance for two domains of research: (1) the history and theory of existentialism and (2) decolonial theory and praxis.

Thomas Thayer
Professor of Painting, Drawing, and Diverse Media
Art Department
Smoke Shoveler

Smoke Shoveler is a multimedia art project comprising music/sound, performance, video, and physical art objects rooted in improvisation, animism, shamanism, and other forms of expression from the remote recesses of human communication. Drawing on Art Brut, children's art, and experimental education, my surreal artworks have a crude, naive spirit. I activate my paintings and sculptures with animation and music in improvised performances I call Scenographic Plays. I have exhibited and performed since the early 90s at venues including The Living Theater, Issue Project Room, SculptureCenter, The Kitchen, The 2012 Whitney Biennial, and MoMA. My work has been positively reviewed in the New York Times by Art Critic Roberta Smith, in the New Yorker by Johanna Fateman and Peter Schjeldahl, and in Arthur Magazine by Byron Coley & Thurston Moore. Smoke Shoveler takes its name from the Incredible String Band's Smoke Shoveler's Song off their 1966 debut album. The Incredible String Band, along with contemporaries like Don Cherry and his Organic Music Society, were pioneers in experimenting with multimedia artistic-musical experiences that melded ancient and contemporary approaches, and with wide-eyed naïveté, explored and experimented in the vast landscape of artistic human culture with the array of tools, vocabularies, and forms existing there. They paved the way for numerous movements, from World Music to (Throbbing Gristle's) Industrial Music. Smoke Shoveler carries on the spirit of investigation begun by these visionary artists. Like all the sound-based art I have made, Smoke Shoveler’s approach stems from historically "outsider" forms of music—from the art music of Jean Dubuffet to Cornelius Cardew's experimental Scratch Orchestra.

2024 - 2025

Harold Aram Veeser
Professor of English
Manorexia: The First Memoir of a Male Anorexic/Bulimic

The gap between zero male anorectic memoirs and hundreds (and growing) of female anorectic memoirs is an intellectual/sociological puzzle. This gender-determined silence is an injustice as well as an opportunity. My own memoir, Manorexia, will be the first autobiographical account written by a male sufferer … researchers are just now studying how eating disorders change men’s and women’s bodies differently and how an eating disorder may affect a man throughout life. My book will be an important intervention alongside these medical studies. 

2023 - 2024

Lale Can
Associate Professor of History
Empire of Exile: Forced Labor and Banishment in Late Ottoman History

Empire of Exile sets out to examine how one of the world's most important empires—the Ottoman (1299-1922)—used forced labor and banishment to punish criminals and dissidents, creating what I term a culture of exile. In contrast to scholarship focusing on modern institutions such as prisons and elites in exile, this project highlights the capacious nature of these interconnected forms of criminal punishment and their impact on wide cross-sections of Ottoman society. By decentering institutional mimesis of the West and examining a range of carceral practices that involved violent forced mobility, this study allows us to see the messy, hybrid practices that shaped the lives of people who challenged the social and political order in the last century of Ottoman rule.

Hajoe Moderegger
Program Director, Digital & Interdisciplinary Art Practice [DIAP] MFA Professor, Art Department
Our Non-Understanding of Everything

Our Non-Understanding of Everything, which consists of scientific research, artistic creation and experiments with different forms of presentation and audience engagement. The 1st segment of the work has just been exhibited at “Current Plans” a gallery in Hong Kong, a 2nd segment is scheduled to open on March 25th for an exhibition at “PS 122” gallery in New York.

Examples of Fellowship applications

For those interested in applying for the Rifkind Fellowship, here are some sample applications

Willis-Rifkind-Fellowship-Proposal-2024.pdf

Moderegger-Rifkind-Fellowship-Proposal-2023.pdf

Crull-Rifkind-Fellowship-Proposal-2021.pdf