KIE’s Alyssa Newman named a 2026-27 Career Enhancement Fellow

Professor Alyssa Newman, the first sociologist to be appointed a Research Scholar at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, has been named a Career Enhancement Fellow by the Institute for Citizens & Scholars for the 2026–27 academic year. The award is funded by the Mellon Foundation and “seeks to increase the presence of outstanding junior faculty committed to campus engagement and thought-provoking research in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.” 

The award will help support Newman’s work on the manuscript of a new book tentatively titled Born a Symbol: Mixed Race Myths, Identity Struggle, and the Quest for Civil Rights as well as her ongoing research on assisted reproductive technologies and on institutional solutions to racial health disparities. She has also published extensively on multiraciality, exploring the topic through a variety of research projects relating to collective identity formation; biology and genetics; the intersection of mixedness and masculinity; immigration; as well as family relationships and reproduction.

The College of Arts and Sciences published a story on September 21 on the award. In it, Newman explains that for “an interdisciplinary scholar bridging sociology and bioethics, this dedicated support is invaluable for building a scholarly trajectory that strengthens bonds between these two fields.” In the story, Karolyn Tyson, a professor and chair of the Department of Sociology, explains that Dr. Newman’s work “is asking powerful questions about thorny issues of race and identity politics.”

In a Sept. 17 story on the award in the student newspaper The Hoya, KIE director Dan Sulmasy says that Newman’s work “is practical and interdisciplinary: practical in the sense that she addresses pressing real life issues; interdisciplinary in that she works at the intersection of sociology, medicine and ethics” and that “[s]he brings her deep expertise in social science to the Kennedy Institute and enhances our understanding of ethical issues.” He goes on to laud her as “a thoughtful, engaging and delightful colleague.”

Read the Sept. 17 story in The Hoya
Read the Sept. 21 story on the College of Arts and Sciences website