Bromwich and Mobarak awarded Carnegie Fellowships

Professors David Bromwich and Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak have received 2017 Andrew Carnegie Fellowships to fund their research projects.

They are among 35 recipients of this year’s awards, given by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Each fellow will receive up to $200,000 to pursue significant research and writing in the social sciences and humanities. It is hailed as the most generous stipend of its kind.

By funding the work of emerging and established scholars, journalists, and authors, the Carnegie Fellowships program aims to strengthen U.S. democracy, drive technological and cultural creativity, explore global connections and global ruptures, and improve both natural and human environments.

Brief profiles of the Yale winners follow:

David Bromwich ’73 B.A., ’77 Ph.D., Sterling Professor of English, is a renowned authority on Romantic and modern poetry and the history of literary criticism. Bromwich mapped the relationship between poetry, criticism, and public life in his books “Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic,” about metaphysician, painter, critic and essayist William Hazlitt, 1778-1830, which was a National Book Critics Circle finalist in 1984; “Disowned by Memory: Wordsworth’s Poetry of the 1790s”; and “A Choice of Inheritance: Self and Community from Edmund Burke to Robert Frost.” His book “Politics by Other Means: Higher Education and Group Thinking” examines the ideological debate over liberal arts education, and his “Skeptical Music: Essays on Modern Poetry” won the 2002 PEN Spielvogel/Diamonstein Prize as the year’s best book of essays by an American. He is also editor of “Romantic Critical Essays” and “On Empire, Liberty and Reform: Speeches and Letters of Edmund Burke” and co-editor of the Yale Press edition of “On Liberty” by John Stuart Mill.

With his Carnegie Fellowship, Bromwich will work on “The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke, Volume 2: From Imperial Reform to the French Revolution,”  a follow-up to his most recent book, “The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke: From the Sublime and Beautiful to American Independence.”

Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak, a native of Bangladesh, is a professor in the School of Management and the Department of Economics. He is also affiliated with Yale’s MacMillan Center.

Mobarak conducts field experiments exploring ways to induce people in developing countries to adopt technologies or behaviors that are likely to improve their welfare. He also examines the implications of scaling up development interventions that are proven effective in such trials. He is currently collaborating with Evidence Action in multiple countries to replicate, test, and scale his research program that encourages rural to urban seasonal migration to counter seasonal poverty. This program, called No Lean Season, is supported by GiveWell.org, Good Ventures and the Global Innovation Fund, and the start-up accelerator Y-Combinator.

Mobarak’s research has been published in journals across disciplines, including Econometrica, Science, The Review of Economic Studies, the American Political Science Review, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Demography. It has been covered by The New York Times, The Economist, Science, NPR, Wired.com, BBC, Wall Street Journal, the Times of London, and other media outlets around the world.

He will use his Carnegie Fellowship to pursue a project titled “The Science of Scaling Up Effective Interventions: An Application to Seasonal Poverty.”