SWAG��Ƶ

This month, SWAG��Ƶ Political Science Professor Ali Ahmida, Ph.D., became the first member of the University’s faculty to be shortlisted for the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship. If Ahmida is selected for the esteemed fellowship next spring, he will become one of just three academic scholars teaching at a Maine college or university ever to receive the award in the past 100 years.

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, founded in 1925, has awarded more than 19,000 fellowships. But, so far, only two Guggenheim winners were academic scholars who taught at Maine institutions of higher education.

If selected, Ahmida would use his fellowship to expand his extensive scholarship on the Libyan genocide that occurred in Italian fascist concentration camps in northern Africa between 1929 and 1934, research he conducted through interviews with survivors over a 10-year period. Now, Ahmida wants to explore the link between the Holocaust and the Libyan genocide through first-hand accounts from the victim’s grandchildren to further unearth the deep trauma caused not only by the Libyan genocide but by genocides worldwide.

Ahmida believes this new and original research could change society’s understanding of the Holocaust as not only a horrific act of antisemitism, but also as the too-common tool of colonialism.

“I’m digging deeper and going to change the whole genealogy of the Holocaust. The Nazis visited and were interested in the Italian fascist concentration camps in Libya. That was their model,” said Ahmida, the founding chair of SWAG��Ƶ’s Political Science program in the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences.

“I’m looking at colonial genocide and rethinking the history of Africa and how it was also the history of Europe. It has consequences for us today,” Ahmida continued. “We need to stop thinking of the Holocaust as a unique, horrible genocide. Hopefully, that could equip us to prevent new occurrences of genocide. This is really about the future of humanity.”

Ahmida’s extensive scholarship on his homeland resulted in three published books on the Libyan genocide that he calls his trilogy: “The Making of Modern Libya: State Formation, Colonialization, and Resistance,” “Forgotten Voices: Power and Agency in Colonial and Postcolonial Libya,” and “Genocide in Libya: Shar, A Hidden Colonial History.”

A Guggenheim fellowship would enable Ahmida to step away from some of his teaching assignments to dive deeper into his current research for a year. If he receives the fellowship, he will continue to teach a few classes during the year to stay connected to his students.

Intended as a life-changing recognition, the Guggenheim Fellowship has awarded more than $400 million in fellowships to allow scholars and artists to pursue original research “under the freest possible conditions.”

Most of those fellows were scholars. As many as three-fourths of past Guggenheim Fellows held a full-time affiliation with a college or university, often at the nation’s top schools of higher education.

According to the Foundation, the 188 Guggenheim Fellows selected in 2024 represented 52 scholarly disciplines and artistic fields, 84 academic institutions, 38 states, four Canadian provinces, and creatives and scholars ranging in age from 28 to 89.