Historian Named a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow

Quinn Slobodian BA ’00 has joined the 2025 class of Guggenheim Fellows—one of just 198 creatives and scholars selected from a nationwide pool of nearly 3,500 applicants for the award’s centennial year. Since 1925, the Guggenheim Foundation has provided fellowships “to exceptional individuals in pursuit of scholarship in any field of knowledge and creation in any art form, under the freest possible conditions,” according to the foundation’s website.

An internationally recognized expert on the intersections of history, capitalism, and politics, Quinn Slobodian BA ’00 serves as a professor of international history at Boston University’s Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies. His scholarship delves into how political and economic ideologies shape our world—past and present.

“It’s a tough time for universities and for the humanities in particular, so I accept this honor with mixed feelings thinking about all the people whose research is not being funded,” says Slobodian. “That said, I have great appreciation for Lewis & Clark and especially for my mentor, Andrew Bernstein [professor of history], for setting me on this fortunate path.”

The fellowship will fund the beginning of his new book about the history of human nature and, specifically, how humans came to be understood as a kind of animal through the social and natural sciences of the postwar decades.

Slobodian is the author of several acclaimed books, including Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Harvard University Press, 2018), which earned the George Louis Beer Prize from the American Historical Association, and Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy (Metropolitan Books, 2023). His most recent work, Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right, was published by Zone Books in April 2025. He also contributes to publications such as The New York Times, The Guardian, and New Statesman.

Slobodian’s research has been supported by leading institutions, including the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Germany’s Volkswagen Foundation. He has held fellowships at Harvard University, Freie Universität Berlin, and Roma Tre. In addition, he has been an associate fellow at the British think tank Chatham House and codirects the History & Political Economy Project. In 2024, Prospect magazine named him one of the “World’s Top 25 Thinkers.”

Slobodian is one of two Lewis & Clark alumni to receive a Guggenheim this year; the other is poet Corey Van Landingham BA ’08.

History