UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Gabeba Baderoon, associate professor of women's, gender and sexuality studies, of African studies and of comparative literature at Penn State, was recently named a Harvard Radcliffe Institute Fellow for the 2024-25 academic year.
Known for its commitment to interdisciplinary research, the institute provides its Radcliffe Fellows with the opportunity to pursue ambitious projects within a unique interdisciplinary environment. Each class consists of highly accomplished scholars in the humanities, sciences, social sciences and arts, as well as writers, journalists, playwrights and other distinguished professionals. Throughout the academic year, the fellows meet regularly to share their work with each other and the public.
For this year’s class, the fifth overall, the institute accepted just over 3% of applicants.
“As a former fellow and dean of the institute, I know firsthand the impact that a Radcliffe Fellowship can have. In the current moment, I have never felt more certain that Radcliffe’s approach — its embrace of interdisciplinary research and discourse across difference — is crucial to generating transformative art, scholarship and writing,” said Tomiko Brown-Nagin, dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Daniel P.S. Paul Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School and professor of history in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. “This talented class of fellows promises to do great things that will deeply impact how we live in today’s world.”
A poet and scholar, Baderoon will use the fellowship to work on “Autobiography of Sand: Relief Map of a Drifting Mind,” a memoir in verse detailing her experience with a concussion.
Baderoon said she applied for eight fellowships last year and had been rejected for six of them when she got the call from the institute. It left her “almost speechless.”
“After I’d worked out what I was hearing, I felt incredibly happy and affirmed about this recognition of my work,” said Baderoon, who serves as co-director of Penn State’s African Feminist Initiative and whose work often focuses on her native South Africa. “Despite the bruising feeling of being rejected for the six other fellowships, on reflection, the process of trying and failing to receive them was also an illuminating experience.”
In her four-page application, Baderoon pointed to place “as my method, archive and language and my hope that the interdisciplinary nature of the institute and the landscape of the Northeast would become a hospitable place for my writing.” The most valuable part of the process, though, she said, was that it allowed her to think intensely about the memoir’s form.
“Concussion is a puzzling and intractable illness, which therefore poses an interesting representational challenge,” she said. “To write about it, I am drawing on a diverse archive that includes research on traumatic brain injury, memoirs of illness, colonial diaries of the Cape, images of an abandoned landscape, personal medical records and the creative journals I could not write for three years after my concussion.”
Baderoon said fellowships and residencies benefit her work in several ways, from stimulating her creative process to allowing her significant time and space to complete her projects.
“On one hand, they allow one to withdraw from the usual routine into an intense focus on a project, and, on the other, they invite one into a scholarly and creative community with a provocative and invitingly broad range of interests,” she said. “Everyone benefits from this duality of concentration and expansiveness, and the cross-disciplinary encounters and conversations that result often lead to new insights and epiphanies. … I’m convinced that fellowships create the possibility of original and ambitious work, and build lasting scholarly and creative friendships.”