Two Yale students named 2024 Soros Fellows

Kristine Guillaume, a Ph.D. student in Yale’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and Ananya Agustin Malhotra, who will pursue her J.D. at Yale Law School are among 30 individuals selected as 2024 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans, a merit-based program that supports graduate study for immigrants or children of immigrants.

Selected from 2,323 applicants, the 2024 Soros fellows are chosen for their achievements and their potential to make meaningful contributions to the United States across fields of study. They each will receive up to $90,000 in funding to support their graduate studies at institutions across the country.

Since it was founded 26 years ago, the fellowship program has provided more than $80 million in funding, and recipients have studied a range of fields from medicine and the arts to law and business. View the full list of 2024 fellows.

Kristine Guillaume, the daughter of Haitian and Chinese immigrants, was raised in Queens, New York, where her parents instilled in her the values of education and engaging meaningfully with communities near and far. Growing up, she developed a passion for storytelling — particularly the stories of marginalized people in society — that has motivated her paths in the fields of academia and journalism.

She graduated from Harvard College in 2020 with a degree in history and literature and African American Studies. As a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow, she pursued independent research on the rise of mass incarceration in the United States through the study of Black prison writing. Her undergraduate honors thesis focused on the prison writings of Angela Davis and George Jackson, which examined how their respective periods of incarceration shaped their visions of Black liberation in the 1970s. At Harvard, she was a reporter for The Harvard Crimson and the paper’s first Black woman president. She has also interned at The Atlantic and CBS Evening News.

Guillaume continued her studies in African American literature and history at the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. She completed a master’s degree in English and American Studies (2021) and another in intellectual history (2022). Her postgraduate work, together with her undergraduate research, laid the foundation for research she is currently pursuing at Yale, where she is doing a Ph.D. in African American Studies and English.

Her research interests are in 20^th and 21^st century African American literature with a focus on Black prison writing, Black feminist theory, and print culture. Her research is grounded in questions about how prison writing across literary forms and genres might provide insight into how to remake conceptions of freedom, justice, and belonging. In addition, her interests in Black print culture and background as a journalist have informed how her research aims to examine the material constraints around prison writing — namely surveillance, censorship, and access to publishing — especially through a consideration of prison newspapers and periodicals. At Yale, Guillaume is also a research fellow for the Black Bibliography Project and volunteers with the Yale Prison Education Initiative.

Ananya Agustin Malhotra, whose parents came to the U.S. from the Philippines and India, and who was born and raised in a bi-cultural and interfaith household Georgia, says she is deeply motivated by her mother and father’s family histories to advocate for a more just and peaceful future United States foreign policy.

Her interests lie at the intersection of global history, international law, and peace and security issues. She graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Princeton University with a concentration in the School of Public and International Affairs. Her undergraduate thesis, based on oral histories with New Mexican Downwinders, explored the human legacies of the 1945 Trinity Test and the U.S. nuclear age. At Princeton, she served as president of the Sexual Harassment/Assault Advising, Resources, and Education (SHARE) Peer Program, where she was first introduced to survivor-centered advocacy.

As a Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford, Malhotra earned an M.Phil. in modern European history with distinction, studying the histories of empire and anticolonialism in shaping international order. Her dissertation research explored the role of epistemology in the global intellectual history of decolonization and has been published in Global Histories and the Journal of the History of Ideas blog. For the last four years, she has advocated for nuclear disarmament and risk reduction through her research, scholarship, and public commentary.

The 2024 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellows join a distinguished community of past recipients, including U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy 03 M.B.A. ’03 M.D., the nation’s first surgeon general of Indian descent, who helped lead the national response to Ebola, Zika, and the coronavirus. It was recently announced that Murthy will be Yale’s 2024 Class Day speaker during Commencement weekend.