The Hilton Kramer Fellowship
In 2013, we inaugurated the Hilton Kramer Fellowship, honoring the extraordinary life and career of our founding Editor, to give one recent college graduate the chance to join our editorial staff and apprentice as a cultural critic for one year. This salaried program—which appears to be unique in the world of cultural criticism—has been a boon to our staff, and it has launched a number of promising careers. Previous Fellows have gone on to work in such prestigious news organizations as The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, City Journal, and other venues. We also have three alumni of the program on our own editorial staff: Benjamin Riley (2015–16 Fellow), Managing Editor; Robert S. Erickson (2019–20 Fellow), Associate Editor; and Isaac Sligh (2020–21 Fellow), Associate Editor. The current Fellow is Suzanna Murawski, a graduate of the University of Chicago.
The Hilton Kramer Fellowship has been an enormous success in replenishing the ranks of young conservative writers, and it has been funded entirely through your contributions.
Meet the current and previous Hilton Kramer fellows
2024–2025
Suzanna Murawski
Suzanna Murawski is the twelfth and current Hilton Kramer Fellow at The New Criterion. She recently graduated from the University of Chicago, where she received a B.A. from the Fundamentals program and an M.A. in political philosophy. She has written on Western art, Hannah Arendt, Augustine of Hippo, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
2023–2024
Luke Lyman
Luke Lyman was the eleventh Hilton Kramer Fellow at The New Criterion. He graduated from Brigham Young University, where he studied political philosophy and art history. As an undergraduate, he earned grants and fellowships to study Leo Strauss, stained glass in Paris, and mosaics in Rome, and he founded BYU’s first journal of cultural criticism. In fall 2024, he will begin a prestigious Rago Fellowship at The Wall Street Journal.
2022–2023
John M. Wisdom
John M. Wisdom graduated in June 2022 from Dartmouth College with a B.A. in History, specializing in early modern European revolutions. John specifically enjoys writing about the myriad cultural conflicts of the English Civil War and French Revolution. He hails from New Orleans, Louisiana, and he hopes to continue his studies in the future at law or graduate school.
2021–2022
Jane Coombs
Jane Coombs studied medieval history and literature at the University of Cambridge and earned an M.A. from the Courtauld Institute of Art, focusing on nineteenth-century British art. She currently works as a copywriter and freelance arts reviewer in New York.
2020–2021
Isaac Sligh
Isaac Sligh is an Associate Editor at The New Criterion. After serving as the head curator of the Ralston Listening Library and Archive in Sewanee, Tennessee, one of the nation’s largest collections of recorded classical music, Isaac joined the magazine as its eighth Hilton Kramer Fellow. His work has appeared in a number of venues, including The Wall Street Journal, The Spectator (World Edition), The Critic, and Literary Review.
2019–2020
Robert Erickson
Robert Erickson is an Associate Editor at The New Criterion. He received a B.A. in Classics and the Program in Literary Studies from Middlebury College in 2018. After a year teaching ELA at a charter school in the South Bronx, he joined the magazine in 2019 as the seventh Hilton Kramer Fellow. When his term was completed, he read classics as a postbaccalaureate at Columbia University before returning as a full-time editor in 2021.
2018–2019
Hannah Niemeier
Hannah Niemeier graduated in 2018 from Hillsdale College, where she studied English and journalism. She was the Culture editor of the campus newspaper and editor of the campus literary journal, as well as the co-president of the college’s honors program and the director of the writing center. She currently serves as the Managing Editor of Modern Age.
About her time in New York and at The New Criterion, Hannah says,
“Coming from a small town in Nebraska with a population of thirty-five, working at a magazine in a big city is the perfect combination: I get to explore a new part of the world and see firsthand the way The New Criterion reads, writes, and edits fine cultural criticism about it.”
2017–2018
Andrew L. Shea
Andrew joined The New Criterion after graduating from Dartmouth College in June 2017 with a B.A. in English and Studio Art. At Dartmouth, he played double bass in The Barbary Coast Jazz Ensemble and completed an honors thesis in oil painting. In his English major, he concentrated on literature of the American frontier. After two years with The New Criterion as its Assistant then Associate Editor, Andrew studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design, where he received an MFA.
Andrew credits the Fellowship with expanding his cultural horizons and honing his critical voice:
“As a writer and painter, the opportunity to enmesh myself in New York’s cultural scene—and to do so as part of my job right out of college—was extraordinary. The wooded campus of Dartmouth was a wonderful setting in which to develop my painting practice and critical thinking skills, but working for The New Criterion in New York as Hilton Kramer Fellow enabled me to see in person the art I had until then seen only in reproduction, and to submit my writing for the first time to the public sphere. Learning critical writing at a magazine so singularly committed to precision and clarity was an edifying experience, one made even more so by The New Criterion’s focus on the cultural and artistic subjects about which I am most passionate. In short, the Fellowship was a fantastic experience, and I am delighted to continue working at The New Criterion as Assistant Editor.”
2016–2017
Mene Ukueberuwa
Mene Ukueberuwa joined The New Criterion after graduating from Dartmouth College, where he was Editor of The Dartmouth Review. Following his time at The New Criterion, Mene secured a coveted Bartley Fellowship at The Wall Street Journal, where he currently serves as an editorial board member.
“When I served as an editorial intern at The New Criterion in 2012, I’d had only hints of exposure to high culture. My weeks at The New Criterion were invaluably enriching. In that short time I developed the context to appreciate the best of our culture. When I returned to the magazine for the Fellowship in 2016, those seedlings of understanding planted four years earlier started to bear fruit. Having continued to cultivate a taste for the art and ideas discussed in the magazine, I found myself able to approach these topics with judgment in addition to appreciation—a disposition that is rare in the contemporary world. Today’s entire intellectual climate tends to stifle rather than strengthen our willingness to discriminate—that is, to recognize what’s good and what’s bad, and then utter our opinions out loud. Thankfully, The New Criterion remains up to the task of educating us in this most human of tasks. I’m sincerely grateful for my time at TNC, which not only improved my critical faculties, but also prepared me to exercise them as I continue my career.”
2015–2016
Benjamin Riley
Benjamin Riley is now Managing Editor of The New Criterion. After a successful Fellowship year at the magazine, he decamped for the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, to pursue his M.A. in the History of Art, writing his dissertation on the masonry bridges of the Scottish architect Robert Adam (1728–92), an illustrated and expanded version of which was published by Triglyph Books in early 2023. His writing has appeared in The New Criterion, The Georgian Group Journal, The Spectator, and The Wall Street Journal, among other outlets.
“My time as the Hilton Kramer Fellow was not only highly enjoyable but also exceptionally fruitful. I was given the chance to refine my voice and learn the critical art of editing, skills not easily acquired otherwise. It’s an honor to be back at the magazine in a permanent position.”
2014–2015
Christine Emba
For her undergraduate studies, Christine earned an A.B. in public and international affairs from Princeton University. Christine served as a deputy editor at The Economist’s Intelligence Unit for two years, and then accepted the Hilton Kramer Fellowship in 2014. After her year at The New Criterion, Christine moved on to The Washington Post, where she currently contributes to the Opinion section.
“The Hilton Kramer Fellowship was a delightful foray into the world of culture and the hands-on work of its preservation. My time at The New Criterion was formative, and the range of experience the Fellowship allowed—editing, writing, and interacting with some of criticism’s brightest minds—will influence my own journalism for years to come.”
2013–2014
Eric C. Simpson
The inaugural Hilton Kramer Fellow, Eric C. Simpson has become an established music critic in New York, appearing in The Wall Street Journal and The Hopkins Review and contributing regularly to The New York Classical Review. After five years on The New Criterion’s Editorial staff, Eric left to join the Paideia Institute, where he served as Chief Development Officer. He is now the Director of Development at Opera Lafayette. Prior to joining The New Criterion, he earned a B.A. in Classics from Yale College.
“When I came to The New Criterion, first as an intern, and then as Hilton Kramer Fellow, I had little inkling of what it really meant to be a cultural critic. Music had been the greatest passion of my life for as long as I could remember, but approaching it from the angle of a discerning and opinionated observer, rather than a performer, was a new and refreshing experience. The Hilton Kramer Fellowship gave me a home base, a chance to work closely with some of the finest writers and editors in the cultural arena, and an opportunity to build a meaningful career as an arts critic. Reading and editing articles for The New Criterion was and is an education in itself—I am enormously grateful for the opportunity the Hilton Kramer Fellowship gave me, and I am thrilled to see that it continues to thrive.”