Five New Biography Fellows for 2026 – 2027
Kai Bird, the Executive Director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography, announced today the award of five resident fellowships at the Graduate Center, including a Leon Levy/Alfred P. Sloan fellow for a biography on a figure from science. Mr. Bird, a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, is the author most recently of American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn's Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump, forthcoming in September. Oppenheimer, the global blockbuster motion picture inspired by his biography of Robert Oppenheimer, American Prometheus, won seven Academy Awards, including the Best Picture. The Leon Levy Center for Biography is hosted by the Graduate Center at the City University of New York – and generously funded by the Leon Levy Foundation. Each resident fellow receives a Leon Levy Foundation$72,000 grant, research assistance, a private office and full access to research facilities.
Jefferson Cowie is a Pulitzer-Prize winning historian who writes on American politics, labor, and race. He is the author of Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power (2022), The Great Exception: The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics (2016), Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (2010), and Capital Moves: RCA’s Seventy-Year Quest for Cheap Labor (2001). His books have received numerous awards for historical scholarship, and he has published widely in the popular press. He has been honored with a Guggenheim, the Berlin Prize, and other fellowships and residencies. Cowie is the John Seigenthaler Professor in American History at Vanderbilt University. At the Leon Levy Center, he will be working on a biography of country music legend Johnny Cash to be published by Penguin Press.
Levy/Sloan Fellow Catherine Mas holds a Ph.D. in History from Yale University. As a historian of science, she has written about the histories of anthropology, psychology, and medicine in the transnational Americas. Her first book, Culture in the Clinic: Miami and the Making of Modern Medicine (University of North Carolina Press) was a finalist for the American Association for the History of Medicine’s Welch Medal. Mas is writing a biography of Cuban sugar heiress and pioneering primatologist Rosalía Abreu, to be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Mas’s research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council for Learned Societies, and the Institute for Advanced Study.
Rowena Kennedy-Epstein is a professor of gender studies and women's writing at the University of Bristol. She is the author of Unfinished Spirit: Muriel Rukeyser’s Twentieth Century, which won the MLA Matei Calinescu Prize. Her published editions of Rukeyser’s work include The Muriel Rukeyser Era: Selected Prose, which won the MLA Prize for Archival Scholarship, and Rukeyser’s lost novel, Savage Coast. She has been awarded the Cullman Center Fellowship and the Diamonstein-Spielvogel Fellowship from the New York Public Library, as well as the Public Scholars Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and was a visiting scholar at the Oxford Center for Life-Writing. At the Leon Levy Center for Biography, she will work on the first biography of American writer Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980), whose poetry, plays, films, novels, and biographies—accounts of war and the rise of fascism, racial injustice, environmental disaster, motherhood, and sexuality—defied and remade women's positions in twentieth-century America.
Katie Roiphe is the director of the Cultural Reporting and Criticism program at New York University. She is the author of The Violet Hour, In Praise of Messy Lives and The Power Notebooks, among other books. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Harper’s, The Atlantic, The Financial Times, Esquire, New York Magazine, The Guardian, and The Paris Review, among many other publications. She holds a PhD in English literature from Princeton University. She is currently at work on a biographical inquiry into the life and craft of Janet Malcolm.
Angus Reilly is a journalist and historian whose writing has appeared in publications including the Financial Times and the Daily Telegraph. He was previously an editor at Engelsberg Ideas, where he commissioned and edited work on history, politics, and international affairs. As a Leon Levy Fellow he will complete his first book, a biography of Angus ReillyHenry Kissinger’s early life, which examines how Kissinger’s formative experiences – from his childhood in Nazi Germany and his family’s flight as Jewish refugees, to his service in the US Army during and after the Second World War – shaped him and influenced his later career in American foreign policy. The book will be published by Basic Books.
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