Professor Kris Klein Hernández wins $50,000 Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship

Assistant Professor of History Kris Klein Hernández, who joined the Connecticut College faculty in 2022, has won a prestigious 2024 Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship administered by the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine.

The Ford Foundation and National Academies are ending the program after nearly 60 years of supporting faculty of color and faculty who utilize diversity in their scholarship and pedagogy. Their goal is to divert resources previously earmarked for education, which they say sees a good amount of philanthropic funding from elsewhere, toward traditionally underfunded work in social and racial justice.

Klein Hernández, who said he is grateful to be part of the final cohort, is one of only two Conn faculty members to ever win the postdoctoral fellowship, which comes with $50,000 to support a year of full-time research. The other is former Associate Professor of Education Sandy Grande, who is now a professor of political science and Native American and indigenous studies at the University of Connecticut.

“This was one of few opportunities for first-generation scholars of color,” Klein Hernández said. “The Ford community provided a much-needed space of intellectual belonging and rigor, and time to work on my scholarship, which is deeply needed.”

The fellowship will allow Klein Hernández to step away from teaching to complete his first book manuscript, The Color of the Army: Forts and Race-Making in the Nineteenth-Century U.S.-Mexico Borderlands. He will be working with MacArthur fellow Natalia Molina, distinguished professor of American studies and ethnicity at the University of Southern California. Klein Hernández first encountered Molina, a Chicana historian, at the University of Michigan during his graduate studies. He said her pioneering scholarship on relational race and ethnic history shaped his methodological framework on race formation, which he is teaching at Conn this spring in his “Introduction to American Studies” and “Indigeneity and Immigration History” courses.