The John Simon Memorial Guggenheim Foundation has named Emory College professors Aubrey Kelly and Dianne Stewart as 2025 Guggenheim Fellows. Kelly and Stewart are two of the 198 distinguished individuals across 53 disciplines in the class of 2025 selected for their history of career achievement and exceptional promise.
“We are incredibly proud of our Emory College faculty members who have received this prestigious honor,” says Emory College Dean Barbara Krauthamer. “The Guggenheim Fellowship is a testament to the power of bold, original scholarship, and this recognition underscores the profound impact our faculty continues to make in their fields and the broader world.”
Kelly and Stewart will receive a monetary stipend to pursue independent work at the highest level under, according to the Guggenheim Foundation, “the freest possible conditions.”
Kelly is an associate professor of psychology in Emory College who joined the faculty in August 2018. In her research, she studies how the brain allows animals to be social, from fish to birds to rodents. Currently in her lab, she and her trainees are studying spiny mice to understand what makes animals behave prosocially with strangers and form bonds with peers, as well as how the brain influences group dynamics. The Kelly Lab utilizes an interdisciplinary approach, combining techniques from behavioral ecology, neuroendocrinology, developmental neurobiology, molecular biology and genetics. This research gives a window into the primitive origins of modern human behaviors.
“I’m incredibly honored and grateful that the Guggenheim Foundation finds our behavioral neuroscience research to be a worthwhile pursuit,” says Kelly. “The fellowship will allow me to develop collaborations with experts in collective behavior and neurophysiology in Europe and the U.S. With these new tools, we will be able to use spiny mice to ask unprecedented questions about how the brain facilitates cohesion in complex societies.”
Stewart is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Religion and African American Studies in Emory College. Her research and teaching focus on African heritage religious cultures in the Caribbean and the Americas, including the practices of African-descended people in the Anglophone Caribbean and the U.S., the impact of African civilizations upon religion in the African diaspora, and womanist approaches to religion and society. To that end, she is the author of three published books focusing on Afro-Jamaican ancestral religions, Black love and partnership, and Yoruba-Orisa adherents’ struggle for religious freedom in Trinidad.
“It feels truly gratifying to be recognized for my scholarly contributions to religious studies, particularly Africana religious studies,” says Stewart, who will be using the support provided from the fellowship to complete a book, tentatively titled “Local and Transnational Legacies of African Christianity in West-Central Africa and the Black Atlantic World.”
The book will focus on the untold story of how Kongo Catholicism inspired the formation of Afro-Protestant institutions among African descendants in the 18th and 19th-century Atlantic world.
“I am delighted about this honor, and I cherish the opportunity to devote focused time to my book project,” she says.
“The Guggenheim Fellowship celebrates a century of support for the lives and work of visionary scientists, scholars, writers and artists,” said Edward Hirsch, award-winning poet and president of the Guggenheim Foundation. “We believe that these creative thinkers can take on the challenges we all face today and guide our society towards a better and more hopeful future.”
The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation was created in 1925 by U.S. Sen. Simon Guggenheim and his wife, Olga Guggenheim, in memory of their son, John Simon.
Since its establishment, the Guggenheim Foundation has granted more than $400 million in fellowships to more than 19,000 individuals, among whom are more than 125 Nobel laureates, members of all the national academies, winners of the Pulitzer Prize, Fields Medal, Turing Award, Bancroft Prize, National Book Award and other internationally recognized honors. The broad range of fields of study is a unique characteristic of the fellowship program.