Professor Kristin Hoganson is one of two University of Illinois professors to be awarded a 2025 Guggenheim Fellowship. English professor Corey Van Landingham also received a fellowship.
They are among 198 individuals working across 53 disciplines chosen through a rigorous peer-review process from nearly 3,500 applicants. The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowships are awarded to exceptional individuals in pursuit of scholarship in any field of knowledge and creation in any art form, under the freest possible conditions.
Hoganson’s project, “Infrastructural Power: U.S. Empire Building at the Dawn of the Big Carbon Era,” connects the history of infrastructure building to the growing footprints — political, economic, military and ecological — of the U.S. in the Caribbean area in the building boom years from the War of 1898 to the Wall Street crash of 1929. In addition to uncovering the magnitude and nature of U.S. involvement in transportation and electrification projects from Mexico to Venezuela and in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Haiti and the Dominican Republic, she considers how U.S. engineers — both private sector and military — advanced U.S. interests.
Her research highlights the role of civil engineering projects in displacing European rivals, extracting wealth, tying regional economies to the U.S. and enabling U.S. military access, white settlement and tourism. As a Guggenheim Fellow, she will continue to research how these projects affected daily lives, working conditions, labor movements, Indigenous communities, nationalist politics, ecologies and fossil fuel usage, with implications that continue to our own time.
Hoganson is the Stanley S. Stroup Professor of U.S. History and has affiliations in gender and women’s studies and the Center for Global Studies at Illinois. She was named a 2024 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow. A specialist in U.S. foreign relations history, she is the author of four books, most recently The Heartland: An American History.
Editor's Note: This story was adapted from a story on the University of Illinois News Bureau website.