Mellon Foundation Appoints Historian and Scholar Kelly Lytle Hernández as its 2023 Fellow in Residence
The Mellon Foundation today announced the appointment of its newest Mellon Foundation Fellow in Residence, Kelly Lytle Hernández, a renowned scholar, author, and historian who currently serves as a professor of History, African American Studies, and Urban Planning at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). Lytle Hernández joins Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Natalie Diaz, whose 2023 fellowship, announced last year, will be extended through 2024.
Professor Lytle Hernández holds The Thomas E. Lifka Endowed Chair in History at UCLA and is the author of award-winning books, including: Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol; City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles; and Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands. She also leads the Million Dollar Hoods research initiative, which maps the fiscal and human cost of mass incarceration in Los Angeles. Named a MacArthur Fellow in 2019, Professor Lytle Hernández is also a member of the Society of American Historians, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Pulitzer Prizes Board.
A ground-breaking poet, language activist, and educator, Natalie Diaz authored two poetry collections: When My Brother Was an Aztec and Postcolonial Love Poem, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Diaz is the founding director of Center for Imagination in the Borderlands at Arizona State University, where she holds the Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry. A 2018 MacArthur Fellow, and Senior Fellow at the Institute on Race, Power and Political Economy at The New School, she’s also the Inaugural Baldwin-Emerson Fellow for the “I See My Light Shining” Oral History Project in which she gathers the stories and experiences of Native artists and scholars whose work is shaped by water. Diaz recently received the 2023 Arts and Letters Award from the Pete C. Garcia Victoria Foundation and is a member of the Board of the University of California Humanities Research Institute and the United States Artists. She is the spring 2024 Rosenkranz Writer-In-Residence at Yale University.
“Kelly Lytle Hernández and Natalie Diaz are brilliant thinkers and creators who illuminate vital issues, aesthetics, and perspectives in our complex society,” said Foundation President Elizabeth Alexander. “We are honored and delighted that Kelly is joining us as a Mellon Fellow and that Natalie is beginning her second fellowship year. We look forward to the rich, generative opportunities for learning and collaboration that their time as Fellows at the Foundation will spark.”
Created in 2015 to engage artists, scholars, and curators in the joint effort of exploring both the timely and urgent challenges and opportunities at the intersection of the arts and humanities, the Mellon Foundation’s Fellows in Residence program gives fellows the opportunity to pursue their own writing and research while advising on programs, convenings, and conversations in collaboration with Foundation leadership and staff. Lytle Hernández and Diaz join as Mellon Fellows in Residence through August 2024 while continuing to pursue their own research and writing.
“This fellowship is a thrilling opportunity to work closely with the Mellon Foundation--a transformative leader in higher education and the arts,” said Lytle Hernández. “I look forward to being in residence with the Foundation's team and contributing to their efforts to seed and support vital initiatives across the nation.”
“I work and imagine best when I’m alongside others’ thoughts, imaginings, wonders, and that is something that is always available when I’m at Mellon as part of the Fellows in Residence program,” said Diaz. “My approach to writing is very influenced by the way I grew up – in community. I’m excited to in community with the Mellon team into 2024.”
Lytle Hernández and Diaz join a cohort of prominent leaders in the arts and humanities who have served as Fellows and worked with Foundation colleagues on shared interests. Previous Mellon Foundation Fellows in Residence include: William D. Adams, former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities and President Emeritus of Colby College; Karen Brooks Hopkins, former president of the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM); Johnnetta Cole, former director of the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art and President Emerita of Spelman and Bennett Colleges; Cathy Davidson, distinguished professor at the CUNY Graduate Center; Farah Jasmine Griffin, Columbia University inaugural chair of African American diaspora studies, Stephen Pitti, professor of history and American studies at Yale University; James Shulman, vice president and COO of the American Council of Learned Societies; Clint Smith, best-selling author of “How the Word Is Passed,” and Olga Viso, senior advisor for global partnerships at Arizona State University’s Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts and former executive director of the Walker Art Center.
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About The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is the nation’s largest supporter of the arts and humanities. Since 1969, the Foundation has been guided by its core belief that the humanities and arts are essential to human understanding. The Foundation believes that the arts and humanities are where we express our complex humanity, and that everyone deserves the beauty and empowerment that can be found there. Through our grants, we seek to build just communities enriched by meaning and guided by critical thinking, where ideas and imagination can thrive. Learn more at mellon.org.