Yale's Daniel Martinez HoSang has received a 2026 Andrew Carnegie Fellowship to support his research into political polarization and to identify potential solutions.
HoSang, a professor of American studies and political science in Yale's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, is among 24 scholars awarded the annual fellowship, which funds research projects in the social sciences and humanities. Each fellow will receive a $200,000 research grant.
For the third consecutive year, the Carnegie Corporation selected scholars who are exploring "what can be done to strengthen the forces of cohesion in the United States, an overarching priority for the foundation's grantmaking." Since 2024, the Carnegie Corporation has committed $18 million to scholarly research focused on political polarization.
That funding, which has been awarded to 24 fellows during that time, allows scholars to take a sabbatical of up to two years so they can focus on this work.
"Andrew Carnegie saw it as his mission to encourage, in the broadest and most liberal manner, investigations, research, and discovery, and the application of knowledge to the improvement of mankind," said Dame Louise Richardson, president of Carnegie Corporation of New York and chair of the Andrew Carnegie Fellows jury.
"Through support of our fellows, we are continuing that mission and seeking to harness the insights of scholars of all ages, stages, and disciplines to help us understand the nature of political polarization in the United States today and to devise a means of mitigating its impact on American society."
HoSang is an interdisciplinary scholar of racial formation and racism in politics, culture, and the law. In addition to his appointments in the departments of American Studies and Political Science he holds appointments in the Yale School of Medicine's Section of the History of Medicine and Yale's Institution for Social and Policy Studies, which advances interdisciplinary research in the social sciences that aims to shape public policy and inform democratic deliberation.
His recent work has focused on the emergence and expansion of the multiracial right in the U.S. and beyond. Drawing on field research at political gatherings, community organizations, and media networks, he analyzes how contemporary right-wing movements are building diverse coalitions and cultivating new forms of political belonging.
Across his writing, he traces how these formations reconfigure ideas of nation, citizenship, and democracy in an era of institutional distrust and political cynicism.
HoSang's project, "The Cynical Style in American Politics," examines how cynicism toward politics and institutions emerges from lived experiences of abandonment and structural failure rather than from rigid ideological commitments, advancing a new framework that understands cynicism as a political style shaping how people interpret the state, their opponents, and the possibilities of collective action. It also identifies local practices and initiatives, from community-based governance to collaborative public problem-solving, that can counter cynicism, mitigate polarization, and help rebuild democratic trust.
The 2026 fellows were chosen from a pool of more than 381 submissions. A panel of jurors selected proposals based on originality and promise, the potential for impact in the field, and the scholars' plans for communicating their findings to the broader world.
HoSang is the 11th Yale faculty member to be named a Carnegie fellow since the program was created in 2015.
