Franke Visiting Fellows

Each year, the Whitney Humanities Center invites at least one leading writer, artist, or public intellectual to join our community as a Franke Visiting Fellow. Established in 2005 through the generosity of Richard and Barbara Franke, this fellowship supports bold and imaginative work across the humanities. Fellows pursue their own projects while also engaging with the intellectual life of the WHC—exchanging ideas with Yale faculty, contributing to the weekly WHC Fellows Forum, and sharing their work-in-progress in a free, public lecture.

Please note there is no application process: Franke Visiting Fellows are selected and invited by the director of the WHC.

Katie Kitamura

Spring 2027

Award-winning novelist Katie Kitamura is the author, most recently of Audition, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Booker Prize, and National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. 

Her work has been translated into 29 languages and is being adapted for film and television. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Rome Prize in Literature, the Berlin Prize, and a Cullman Center Fellowship. She teaches in the creative writing program at New York University.

Katie Kitamura

Past Franke Visiting Fellows Lectures