Two Northwestern students receive Soros Fellowships for New Americans

JK Anowe, a graduate student in the English department at Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, and Devika Ranjan, a Ph.D. candidate in performance studies at the School of Communication, have each been awarded a 2025 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans.

Anowe and Ranjan were among 30 scholars selected from a competitive pool of more than 2,600 applications nationwide. The prestigious award, now in its 27th year, supports outstanding scholars who are immigrants or the child of immigrants who are poised to make a significant contribution to U.S. culture, society and academia.

Each fellow will receive up to $90,000 in financial support toward an advanced degree program as well as access to the Soros Fellowship’s community of distinguished alumni.

Anowe was born to a family of yam farmers in Issele-Uku, Nigeria. The family moved to Jos, Nigeria, for economic opportunity. In Jos, interreligious riots repeatedly uprooted his family and embedded violence into everyday life. Through the process of writing poetry, Anowe said he discovered a means of connecting his personal experiences of violence with the structural and state violence he witnessed while growing up. 

At Northwestern, Anowe is an MFA+MA student in the Litowitz Creative Writing Graduate Program and a Gwendolyn M. Carter Fellow in African Studies, where he studies Igbo history, philosophy and religion. He plans to pursue a Ph.D. in English and African studies to build on his graduate thesis by researching how postcolonial writers are reinventing African storytelling traditions in our globalized world. He hopes through his poetry to encourage a new generation of thinkers who are invested in preserving African history, literature and philosophy.

“Receiving the fellowship at this point in my career is an incredible affirmation of the years of work I have put into my poetry,” Anowe said. “With the support of the Paul & Daisy Soros Foundation, I hope to devote myself to finishing and publishing my first manuscripts. At a time when anti-immigrant sentiment is peaking in the U.S., I am deeply honored to join a community that exemplifies all that new Americans bring to our communities here.”

Ranjan was born in Nashik, India, and raised in various parts of the U.S. — from mountain towns to prairie landscapes and coastal communities. Through her family’s journey across the country, Ranjan found her calling as a writer, educator and theater-maker who tells critical and creative stories about migration. She specializes in devised immersive performance and has facilitated workshops with refugees and migrants internationally.

A current Ph.D. student in performance studies at Northwestern, Ranjan is studying borders, surveillance and ecologies of liberation. As associate director of Albany Park Theater Project in Chicago, she has worked with immigrant and first-generation teens to create ethnographic immersive theater about community issues like family separation, labor rights and deportation. She is a past fellow at the Lab for Global Performance and Politics at Georgetown University. Ranjan studied at the University of Cambridge on a Marshall Scholarship where she was awarded a MPhil with distinction for research on the electronic tagging of asylum-seekers.

“The Soros Fellowship allows me the space and support to transform narratives about migration in the public sphere through creative non-fiction, performance and scholarship,” Ranjan said. “Most of all, I am thrilled to be part of a community of immigrants, across disciplines. Being part of this community will nurture my ability to draw attention to urgent migration issues and develop my agility to move among policy, academia and the public.”

Northwestern students interested in pursuing scholarship and fellowship opportunities should contact the Office of Fellowships to learn more.