Joshua Bennett awarded Institute for Advanced Study fellowship

Joshua Bennett, Professor of Literature and Distinguished Chair of the Humanities, has been awarded a fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) for the 2025-26 academic year.

Established in 1930 in Princeton, New Jersey, IAS seeks to advance the frontiers of knowledge across the sciences and humanities. Each year, IAS welcomes more than 250 of the most promising post-doctoral researchers and distinguished scholars from around the world to advance fundamental discovery as part of an interdisciplinary and collaborative environment. 

During his stay, Bennett will work on his next book of criticism, “The Art of Opacity,” which is concerned with the role of dissemblance in African American literature and life. Turning to the works of Ralph Ellison, Anne Spencer, Frederick Douglass, June Jordan, and others, Bennett argues that opacity is often a form of collective self-preservation: a means through which Black culture workers deploy a kind of critical withholding—a commitment that manifests even at the level of the built environment—to protect the people, places, and ideas that made them possible. 

“It’s a joy to return to Princeton, a place that had a singular impact on my formation as a scholar and poet,” he says. “I look forward to meeting new friends and colleagues, and to reconnecting with the ones I first met over a decade ago.”

Bennett is one of four MIT scholars awarded fellowships for the 2025-26 year.

Visiting scholars are selected through a highly competitive process for their bold ideas, innovative methods, and deep research questions by the permanent Faculty—each of whom are preeminent leaders in their fields. Research at IAS is conducted across four Schools—Historical Studies, Mathematics, Natural Sciences, and Social Science—to push the boundaries of human knowledge.

Among past and present scholars, there have been 37 Nobel Laureates, 46 of the 64 Fields Medalists, and 24 of the 28 Abel Prize Laureates, as well as MacArthur and Guggenheim fellows, winners of the Turing Award and the Wolf, Holberg, Kluge, and Pulitzer Prizes.