2024 Public Scholars
Welcoming Nine Visionary Thinkers
We are delighted to announce the second cohort of the Moynihan Public Scholars Fellowship. These scholars stood out among a pool of nearly 150 applicants for their innovative ideas and their commitment to public scholarship. Each fellow will receive an unrestricted award and spend up to one year researching, writing, and contributing to the vibrant intellectual community at The City College of New York.
Emefa Addo Agawu
Writer and Editor
Independent
Emefa Addo Agawu is a Baltimore-based writer and editor whose writing has appeared in the Washington Post, Slate, Vox, and CNN. She is a former member for the Washington Post Editorial Board, the inaugural Post Opinions Fellow and, most recently, worked on The Ezra Klein Show (the New York Times), producing long form interviews on topics like modern masculinity, Martin Luther King Jr.'s political philosophy, artificial intelligence, and communal living.
AT/TENSION
Agawu will devote her fellowship year to writing an essay collection about attention. Driven by extensive original reporting, the essays will center people making unusual choices with their attention in an age of hyper-connectedness. Rather than focusing on specific devices and technologies that constitute our rapidly evolving digital landscape, Agawu will focus on the shifting emotional quality of our lives.
Michael Beckley
Associate Professor of Political Science
Tufts University
Michael Beckley is a foreign policy scholar, whose expertise has been sought in spheres as diverse as the U.S. Intelligence Community, the U.S. Department of Defense, the Rand Corporation, the Carnegie Endowment for Peace, and the American Enterprise Institute. He is an award-winning researcher who publishes regularly in popular media including The Atlantic, The Economist, the Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, the New York Times, NPR, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal.
Rogue Superpower: An Illiberal American Century
Two imminent trends—rapid automation and population aging—are likely to decrease the United States’ strategic dependence on the rest of the world, increasing the prevalence of economic nationalism and political polarization both within the United States and abroad. The result, Beckley argues, may be that the United States becomes a rogue superpower: a self-interested economic and military colossus shorn of moral commitments.
Stephen Eide
Senior Fellow
Manhattan Institute
Stephen Eide is a scholar and policy analyst who, for over a decade, has researched serious mental illness and homelessness in America. A contributing editor to City Journal, his writing appears regularly in the National Review, the New York Daily News, the New York Post, the New York Times, Politico, the Wall Street Journal.
Comparative Mental Health Policy: How Europe Addresses Serious Mental Illness
The American mental healthcare system has a fragmented character that makes it difficult for those in need to access treatment and for those with responsibility to be held accountable. When a mental illness-related tragedy occurs, it can be difficult—impossible—to know which official, program, or agency should have prevented it, yet failed. Eide’s comparative research will interrogate whether European mental health systems are more accountable with respect to serious mental illness than their American counterparts.
Nicolas Guilhot
Professor of Intellectual History
European University Institute, Florence, Italy
Nicolas Guilhot is a scholar of the history of political thought who strives, in his work and his writing, to engage broad audiences beyond the academic community. Beyond his scholarship, he has published in the New Statesman, the Boston Review, The Point, the London Review of Books, Sidecar, and The Conversation.
A Story One Tells: Conspiracy Theories, Liberalism, and the End of History
A Story One Tells considers the idea of conspiracy as a symptom of liberal culture’s current malaise. Conspiracy theories capture the feeling that we may be living at “the end of history” and that the fundamental purpose of politics is to ward off catastrophe. Successfully repealing them, Guilhot argues, is not a matter of “debunking” or defending “truth” but of addressing the existential anxieties inevitably caused by the political foreclosure of our future.
Roya Hakakian
Journalist
Independent
Deeply influenced by both the longstanding literary traditions of Iran and its historical turmoils, Roya Hakakian takes on the most pressing and difficult contemporary sociopolitical issues—exile, persecution, censorship—and injects them with relevance and urgency through a deeply observant and poetic sensibility that makes these subjects accessible to all readers.
Hajj Sayyah (The Traveler)
Hajj Sayyah (The Traveler) tells the story of the first Iranian to become a naturalized US citizen. A self-fashioned Marco Polo, Hajj Sayyah left Iran penniless in 1859. Arriving in the US, he was deeply transformed after encountering notions such as individual liberty and human rights. He believed he’d found a utopia, but was ultimately betrayed by America—dismissed for being a Muslim at the US embassy in Tehran—and then shunned in Iran for having "foreign" ideas. Today, Sayyah’s tale remains emblematic of the Iranian struggle for human rights and democracy against the backdrop of suspicion and hostility between his two homes.
Clara Mattei
Professor of Economics
University of Tulsa
Clara Mattei is a scholar grounded in the emancipatory tradition of heterodox political economy. An award-winning author whose work has been translated in over ten languages, Mattei is the inaugural director of the Center for Heterodox Economics at the University of Tulsa.
The Golden Hour: Booming Markets, False Narratives, and the Decades That Made Modern Society
The Golden Hour proposes a new critical history of the golden era of capitalism, evaluating the unique social and economic circumstances of the postwar decades in Western countries in order to reconsider whether Keynesianism was indeed a primary contributor to their prosperity—as well as whether it was fundamentally different from the economic doctrines that preceded it.
Angela Saini
Journalist and Lecturer
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
An award-winning science journalist and the author of four non-fiction books, Angela Saini’s interdisciplinary research and reporting focus on explaining group difference, how power operates through appeals to science, and challenging biases in research. Saini teaches in the Graduate Science Writing Program at MIT, presents radio shows for the BBC, and podcasts for Science. Her writing appears in National Geographic, the Financial Times, and Foreign Policy.
OTHER: Sex, Race, and Why Putting People in Boxes Doesn’t Work
OTHER seeks to understand and interrogate the act of human classification to show how the broad categories invented and employed by government agencies, institutions, and corporations can—sometimes counterintuitively—serve to reinforce bias.
Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins
Assistant Professor of History
Wesleyan University
Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins is an intellectual historian of 20th century global political thought whose work examines the promises and perils of using history to understand the present. He is a committed public scholar, publishing regularly in the premier academic journals of intellectual history as well as public-facing journals such as The Atlantic, The Guardian, and Foreign Affairs.
Impossible Peace, Improbable War: Raymond Aron and World Order
Raymond Aron, France's preeminent liberal thinker of the twentieth century, was a sociologist and a public intellectual who, like Moynihan, refused to separate the academic from matters of ultimate public concern. Impossible Peace, Improbable War will offer the first account of the origins and evolution of Aron's thinking on World Order, from Nazi Imperialism to the Algerian Revolution to American Cold War foreign policy.
Mark Vandevelde
Journalist
Financial Times
Mark Vandevelde is a journalist at the Financial Times newspaper in New York, where he writes about the most powerful financial firms on Wall Street, the billionaires who control them, and the transformation that they have wrought upon America.
The Private Equity Complex
“Private equity,” the business of buying and selling entire companies using other people’s money, has become the defining idea of Wall Street. It has shaken the structure of human enterprise more forcefully than any financial innovation since the Dutch East India Company traded on the first stock market four centuries ago. Vandevelde will work on a book-length manuscript offering a vivid account of how private equity has for five decades been remaking the global economy.
Diversity of Thought, Unity of Purpose
While each individual Moynihan Public Scholar is remarkable, each cohort also stands out for the breadth of projects and perspectives that it embodies. Such intellectual diversity represents the challenge and the promise of American democracy, and the Public Scholars Fellowship offers a testing ground for novel ideas in dire need.
Scholarship, Practice, Engagement
Moynihan Public Scholars are intellectual leaders who meet at the intersection of innovative academic research, concrete political practice, and effective popular communication. Each Public Scholar is committed to critical—and even heterodox—thinking aimed at the pursuit of the common good in the context of an open society.
