Harvey Young Awarded Prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship
Harvey Young, dean of the College of Fine Arts since 2018, will step down from the role July 1, then take a sabbatical to write a book supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship, before returning to CFA to teach. He’ll remain in his role as inaugural and interim vice president for the arts until a permanent vice president is named. Photo by Doug Levy
Harvey Young Awarded Prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship
CFA dean will step down from the role July 1 and take a yearlong sabbatical to work on a book project supported by the fellowship, then return to the CFA faculty
What do the early 20th-century World’s Fairs have in common with the concerts that studded Beyoncé’s Renaissance World Tour 100 years later? Both were big, popular entertainment events that drew enormous, diverse crowds. And both offered windows into the exploration of culture and race for people with an intrinsic curiosity about others, says Harvey Young, dean of the College of Fine Arts (CFA).
“There’s an inherent curiosity and fascination and sincere interest in other people, other groups, other cultures,” says Young, who holds appointments as professor of English, theatre arts, American studies, and African American and Black diaspora studies at Boston University. Young announced earlier this year that he would step down as dean at the end of the spring semester, but will return to the faculty at CFA after a sabbatical.
“I’m interested in exploring the curiosity, fascination, and desire for individuals to learn about and experience race through select live and mediated performances,” Young says. His thesis, which is the subject of a forthcoming book 13 years in the making, “argues that Blackness, as an idea, and Black folk, as individuals, proved sufficiently alluring, attractive, and inspiring across the 20th century that ideas of community and interpersonal relationships were premised on them,” he says.
Young’s exploration of this subject is also, in part, what earned him a Guggenheim Fellowship, a prestigious grant from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
Each year, the foundation awards fellowship grants to individuals making significant contributions in the natural sciences, the social sciences, the creative arts, and the humanities. Young is part of the 101st class of Guggenheim Fellows—a cohort of 223 distinguished individuals working across 55 disciplines. Chosen through a rigorous application and peer review process from a pool of nearly 5,000 applicants, the Class of 2026 Guggenheim Fellows “was tapped based on both prior career achievement and exceptional promise,” according to a release by the foundation.
“Guggenheim Fellows represent the world’s best thinkers and creators, and we are proud—but not surprised—that Dean Young was honored among this year’s class,” says Gloria Waters, University provost and chief academic officer. “Harvey is a preeminent scholar in his field and an outstanding member of the Boston University community. This award is a celebration of both.”
For Young, the honor was “a pleasant, wonderful, joyful surprise.”
Building an Arts-Rich BU, in a New Role
Young’s research, supported by the Guggenheim Fellowship, will run concurrently with a sabbatical he had already planned to take at the end of the academic year. He announced earlier this year that he would be stepping down as dean at the end of the spring semester, with plans to return to CFA as a faculty member after his yearlong sabbatical.
In the meantime, Young, who was appointed inaugural and interim vice president for the arts in the fall, will continue on in that role throughout his sabbatical and until a permanent vice president is named.
Serving as dean of the College of Fine Arts has been a privilege, and I am deeply grateful to the faculty, staff, students, and alumni whose creativity and commitment define this college.
“Serving as dean of the College of Fine Arts has been a privilege, and I am deeply grateful to the faculty, staff, students, and alumni whose creativity and commitment define this college,” Young says.
“I will remain an advocate for President Gilliam’s inspiring vision for an increasingly arts-rich Boston University and, of course, for our amazing College,” Young wrote in an email to CFA students, faculty, and staff on February 5.
In a letter to the BU community sent on the same day, Waters highlighted Young’s “transparent, accessible, and consistent leadership” throughout his tenure, adding that he’s “elevated and helped facilitate greater distinction for the three schools within CFA as well as the Boston University Tanglewood Institute, BU Art Galleries, BU Bands, and Wheelock Family Theatre.”
Office for the Arts
To some extent, Young’s next chapter has already begun. As inaugural vice president for the arts, Young helped establish BU’s new Office for the Arts, a hub for developing and celebrating the arts at BU. The office supports University-wide programs that advance community-building through the arts, encourage interdisciplinary arts teaching and research, and highlight diverse artists and forms of artistry.
“I am excited about expanding access to the arts at a scale unprecedented for a university. We have a visionary president in Dr. Gilliam,” Young says. “In addition, Kenneth Feld (Questrom’70), one of the world’s most admired business leaders, and I are cochairing an extraordinary international task force of accomplished, prominent thought leaders with experience making change at the scale of a city. There is so much potential to be realized.” (Feld is a former chair of Boston University’s Board of Trustees.)
Under Young’s leadership, the foundational activity on these fronts is already underway. The University formed a BU arts task force late last year to identify opportunities to expand existing arts programming or build out new ones. The Office for the Arts has also notched some early wins: its members expanded arts programming for student orientation in the fall, including a movie night, a photo scavenger hunt involving public art on campus, and craft activities inspired by the work of artist (and BU alumna) Howardena Pindell (CFA’65).
The Office for the Arts is also working with its partners in BU Human Resources to identify arts benefits for all BU staff and faculty, and arts office members helped launch Music Mondays, a monthly music series at the Dahod Family Alumni Center at the Castle.
Leading CFA to New Heights
As dean of CFA, Young led the college to new heights. Since his appointment in 2018, CFA’s schools—the School of Visual Arts, the School of Music, and the School of Theatre—have risen in national recognition, with the School of Visual Arts climbing 20 spots in U.S. News & World Report’s graduate rankings and the School of Theatre being recognized by Playbill as a leading producer of Broadway creative teams.
Young also spearheaded a comprehensive curricular redesign within the college, launched new BA and MFA programs, improved the delivery of essential academic support for students, and expanded the reach of CFA’s public programs to ensure greater accessibility of the arts within BU and the broader Boston community. He also oversaw more than $110 million in facility improvements at CFA.
Still, he says some of his proudest moments as dean came from the innovation and perseverance the CFA community displayed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Public health guidelines—physical distance and masking—“created obvious challenges for the performing arts, especially music: a wind instrument can propel breath nearly 15 feet,” he says.
An internationally recognized theater historian, Young came to BU from Northwestern University, where he was a professor and chair of the School of Communication’s theater department and held appointments in African American studies, performance studies, and radio/television/film. He graduated from Yale University in 1997 with a BA in film studies and later earned a master’s degree and a PhD in theater at Cornell University, before joining the faculty at Northwestern.
He is the author or editor of 10 books, most recently Theater and Human Flourishing (Oxford University Press, 2023). He has appeared on CNN, Good Morning America, NPR, and CBC Radio, as well as within the pages of the New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, and Chicago Tribune, among other major news outlets.
Waters will appoint an interim dean to begin by July 1, 2026.