Brooklyn College proudly announces that Professor of History Karen B. Stern Gabbay, Adjunct Professor of Sonic Arts Marina Rosenfeld, Adjunct Professor of English Madeleine Thien, and acclaimed alumna Haruna Lee ’14 M.F.A. have been named recipients of the prestigious 2026 Guggenheim Fellowships.
Lee is a theater maker, educator, screenwriter and community steward based in Brooklyn. Lee’s plays are often an urge to honor their mother’s broken English, to translate experiences despite the gulf of cultures, to know their own psychic blood and guts, and to give up on words entirely and commune through epic imagery and ritual.
Lee is a recipient of the Creative Capital Award for DADBOT (2026), the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize Finalist and Special
Haruna Lee
Commendation for 49 Days (2025), the Steinberg Playwright Award (2021), and the Obie Award for Playwriting and Conception for Suicide Forest (2019). For TV, Lee has written for Apple TV+’s Pachinko and HBO Max’s The Flight Attendant and has developed multiple projects across television, film, and podcast. Lee’s writing has been published by Broadway Licensing, Yale’s Theater Magazine, Table Work Press, and 53rd State Press. Lee helmed the Brooklyn College M.F.A. Playwriting program between 2021 and 2023 and is currently teaching at Hunter College (CUNY) and Yale University.
Lee is in the early stages of the project DADBOT, a hybrid technology-performance piece where Lee’s deceased dad will be resurrected by using conversational AI to simulate the iconic father-child conversation. The performance will be a mix of scripted and nonscripted improvisation between Lee and the AI that will feel a lot like a low-budget talk show where Lee receives the proverbial “fatherly advice.” At the heart of this piece is Lee’s yearning to understand the ties between fatherhood, rebelliousness, and romantic love. The Brooklyn College alumna hopes to capture a spiritual levity in “raising the dead” while interrogating AI’s application in grief work.
Rosenfeld is a composer and artist based in New York. Her works have been presented by institutions including the Park Avenue
Marina Rosenfeld
Armory, the Museum of Modern Art, The Kitchen, the Serralves Foundation, and Portikus Frankfurt; festivals including Wien Modern, Donaueschinger Musiktage, Ultima, and the Holland Festival; and the Whitney, Montreal, PERFORMA, Son, and Gwangju biennials, among many others. She was awarded the Alpert Award in Visual Art in 2024.
Her project “Nulls” is hybrid in nature, linking work with generative sound and recorded media. It deals with research into the sonic and sculptural aftereffects of sound inscription. Thrilled to receive the honor, Rosenfeld added she will use the fellowship as an open-ended time period for research and production.
Karen B. Stern Gabbay
Stern is a respected scholar, educator, and award-winning author who has earned widespread recognition for her interdisciplinary work bridging history, material culture, and religious studies. She is author of Inscribing Devotion and Death: Archaeological Evidence for Jewish Populations of North Africa (Brill 2007) and Writing on the Wall: Graffiti and the Forgotten Jews of Antiquity (Princeton University Press 2018; 2020); winner of a 2020 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award; and co-editor of With the Loyal You Show Yourself Loyal (SBL Press, 2021). Her current book project considers Jewish history through the senses.
Her Guggenheim Fellowship on the topic of “Sanctity: An Archaeology of the Senses in the Ancient Synagogue” will support ongoing field and scientific research overseas, which aims to transform understandings of Jewish history through new interpretations of ancient objects and inscriptions associated with archaeological remains of synagogues, further solidifying her reputation as a leading voice in her field.
Thien has taught literature and fiction in Canada, Hong Kong, Germany, Nigeria, the United States, Zimbabwe, and Singapore. From 2018 to 2024, she was a full professor of English at Brooklyn College, teaching primarily in the M.F.A. Program in Fiction.
Madeleine Thien
Over the past 25 years, she has written about music, neurology, mathematics, physics, and philosophy, and about totalitarianism, protest, survival, and mourning. Her five books include the Booker-shortlisted novel Do Not Say We Have Nothing (Norton, 2016) and The Book of Records (2025), in which a girl and her father live in a building where different centuries wash in like the sea. She has been shortlisted for The Women’s Prize for Fiction, The Folio Prize, The Climate Fiction Prize, The Tadeusz Bradecki Prize, and longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and a Carnegie Medal. She is a recipient of the Governor-General’s Literary Award for Fiction, The Writers Trust of Canada Engel-Findley Award, and an Arts and Letters Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Her current project, A Kind of Beginning, follows two sisters who leave Hong Kong and whose lives diverge. The novel is partly about the incandescence of talent, how brightly it can burn, and how its light dims and transforms. Thien continues to teach as an adjunct professor and remains deeply connected to Brooklyn College’s English Department and its students.
