Five UCLA faculty members are among a distinguished group of 223 scholars, scientists and creative professionals from the U.S. and Canada selected to receive 2026 Guggenheim Fellowships, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation announced today. The new fellows were chosen from a pool of nearly 5,000 applicants.
The prestigious awards, now in their 101st year, recognized scholars in 55 disciplines across the creative arts, social sciences, natural sciences and humanities who have demonstrated exceptional achievement in their fields and show great promise for the future.
This year’s fellows from UCLA — Richard L. Hasen, Jamie Kreiner, Heather Maynard, Sean Metzger and Kay Kyurim Rhie — are engaged in transformative scholarship in areas ranging from law and chemistry to Medieval studies, musical composition, and theater and performance arts.
Each will receive a no-strings-attached monetary stipend to independently pursue work and research of their choice.
“Our new class of Guggenheim Fellows is representative of the world’s best thinkers, innovators and creators in art, science and scholarship,” said Edward Hirsch, president of the Guggenheim Foundation and an award-winning poet. “As the foundation enters its second century and looks to the future, I feel confident that this new class of 223 individuals will do bold and inspiring work, undaunted by the challenges ahead. We are honored to support their visionary contributions.”
Learn more about UCLA’s new Guggenheim Fellows:
Richard L. Hasen
Professor of law and political science, UCLA School of Law
One the nation’s leading election law scholars, Hasen is UCLA’s Gary T. Schwartz Professor Law and the founding director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project, which promotes research, collaboration and advocacy aimed at ensuring continued free and fair elections in the United States. He has written six books on law and democracy and is at work on the seventh, “Unbent Arc: The Rise and Decline of American Democracy 1964–2024,” to be published in 2028 by Princeton University Press.
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Jamie Kreiner
Professor of history, UCLA College
Kreiner, who holds the Robert and Dororthy Wellman Chair in Medieval History, is a historian of the early Middle Ages whose research explores how early medieval culture can point to alternate realities of the human experience while also revealing surprising common ground with the present. Her important published works include the books “The Social Life of Hagiography in the Merovingian Kingdom” (2014, Cambridge University Press), “Legions of Pigs in the Early Medieval West” (2020, Yale University Press) and “The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction” (2023, Liveright/Norton). Kreiner’s current research explores the interface between cognitive science and history and the ways that early medieval cognitive tools and ethics can change our understanding of technology and habits of thinking. During the 2026–27 academic year, she will be a fellow at Stanford University’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.
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Heather Maynard
Professor of chemistry and biochemistry, UCLA College
Maynard, UCLA’s Dr. Myung Ki Hong Professor of Polymer Science and associate director for technology and development at the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA, is a global leader in the development of protein-polymer conjugates, which are important therapeutics for a variety of diseases. In her lab, she develops new synthetic methods to make these materials, invents new polymers to improve properties such as stability, and demonstrates the preclinical efficacy of her conjugates with an eye toward translation for human health. She also works in the area of precision medicine, designing “smart materials” that respond to disease states in the body.
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Sean Metzger
Professor of theater, UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television
Metzger is a scholar who works at the intersections of several fields: visual culture — including art, digital media, fashion, film and theater — as well as cinema, performance and Asian American, Caribbean, Chinese and sexuality studies. He has co-edited four books and published two: “Chinese Looks: Fashion, Performance, Race” (2014, Indiana University Press), which focuses how aesthetics, gender, politics, economics and race have been interwoven through forms of dress from the late 19th through early 21st centuries, and “The Chinese Atlantic: Seascapes and the Theatricality of Globalization” (2020, University of Indiana Press), which examines aesthetic objects and practices in cities from Shanghai to Cape Town. He is at work on his third book, which focuses on law, performance and refugees from the Asian diaspora. In 2025, he was a visiting research fellow at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London.
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Kay Kyurim Rhie
Associate professor of composition, UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music
Rhie is a composer of contemporary classical music of a wide-ranging palette of inspiration, from jazz to European avant-garde to literary traditions. Her compositions often fuse traditions in unexpected ways. Her orchestral pieces “H’on” (Los Angeles Philharmonic), “Goonja Song” (Chicago Grossman Ensemble) and “Three Miniatures for Piano” integrate gestures of Korean folk music with contemporary techniques. Her choral work “Tears for Te Wano” blends Maori chant with a Renaissance motet. Her current project, “Meditation on Voice,” will explore different conditions of voice as both cultural, material and acoustic phenomena.