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The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has awarded
180 Fellowships today to a diverse group of scholars,
artists, and scientists in its eighty-seventh annual
competition for the United States and Canada. Appointed on
the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise, the
successful candidates were chosen from a group of almost
3,000 applicants.
The great variety of backgrounds, fields of study, and
accomplishments among Guggenheim Fellows is one of the
hallmarks of the Fellowship program. This year’s Fellows
range in age from twenty-seven to eighty-four, and originate
from towns and cities across the United States and Canada.
Their Fellowship projects will carry them to all parts of
the world.
The projects supported by this year’s Fellowships are as
varied as the Fellows themselves. David M. Eagleman will be
researching the neurobiology and genetics of synesthesia at
the perceptual, neurobiological, and genetic levels, with an
aim to understand differences in conscious sensory
experience across the population. Rosemary Mahoney will be
studying blindness while addressing the issues encountered
by ninety percent of blind individuals in developing
countries who have no access to education.
Robert Faggen will be writing a biography of author Ken
Kesey, and T. J. Stiles will be working on a
biography of George Armstrong Custer. Historian Thomas
George Andrews will be undertaking an animals’ history of
the United States, revealing the wide-ranging and vital
roles that “other than human” animals have played in
American culture, economics, and politics. Bonnie Jo
Campbell, a novelist who traveled with the Ringling Brothers
and Barnum & Bailey circus for five months, will be writing
a series of interlocking stories set in a contemporary
American circus, revealing a surprisingly rigid social
hierarchy in this multicultural institution. Anthropologist
Jennifer Ellen Robertson will conduct research on service
robots, focusing on their safety, security, and convenience
in relation to the political economy of Japan.
Katherine Franke will examine the dilemmas of citizenship
and its relationship to marriage and freedom, while Stephen
Anthony Gardbaum, an internationally recognized
constitutional scholar, will study the new commonwealth
model of constitutionalism. Adina Hoffman will focus on one
of the most beautiful cities in the world, Jerusalem, and
the stories of individuals who helped shape its design
between 1917 and 1948. Her particular emphasis will be on
the presence, and sometimes glaring absence, of both
physical and psychic beauty in a place of prolonged
conflict.
In East of Eden, photographer Pipo Hieu Nguyen-duy,
once a Vietnamese refugee, will be returning to Vietnam to
visually document the forgotten voices of the war. Artist
Charles Ross will create a Shadow Field on Chupainas
Mesa, located in the New Mexico desert. Shadow Field
will be an earth drawing that collects all of the shadows
cast by the Solar Pyramid, a sculptural element of
his earthwork Star Axis, an architectonic sculpture
that frames the sun and the stars, enabling one to
experience the Earth’s changing alignments. Jesus
Mora, a visual artist, will create paintings, drawings, and
an illustrated version of the Pop Wuj, based on his studies
of that Mayan sacred book and his immersion in the
iconography of the related codices and the Mayan calendar.
Artist Judith Barry will be working on Cairo Stories,
a collection of at least twenty stories that she will edit
into short video monologues to be performed by Egyptian
actors in English and Arabic. She will present several of
the stories at the Sharjah Biennale. Choreographer Ananya
Chatterjea will launch a quartet of evening-length pieces
exploring how women in global communities of color
experience and resist violence. In addition, Randy Weston,
a composer, will be creating a major new piece for jazz
orchestra, African Suite, based on his lifelong study
of the culture, heritage, and music of Africa.
In all, sixty-two disciplines and seventy-four different
academic institutions are represented by this year’s
Fellows. Fifty-one Fellows are unaffiliated or hold adjunct
or part-time positions at universities. As in past years,
supplemental support for some Fellows with no formal
academic affiliation is provided by the Leon Levy
Foundation. The Dorothy Tapper Goldman Foundation has again
funded a Fellowship in Constitutional Studies.
According to President Edward Hirsch, “The Guggenheim
Foundation began as a wonderfully novel experiment. In its
first few years, the Foundation supported maybe a dozen
Fellows in a few key fields. Over the years, its size and
impact have grown tremendously. The initial
$3 million endowment has ballooned to over $260 million. We
now give 180 fellowships in some 78 fields, including such
disciplines as computer science, astrophysics, and African
studies. We also have a sturdy Latin American/Caribbean
program. But, to me, the most significant thing about the
Foundation may be the continuity of our mission, a
commitment to funding individuals at the highest level to do
the work they were meant to do. We don’t support groups or
organizations. We have always bet everything on the
individual, which seems to me increasingly rare in a
corporatized America.”
Since its establishment in 1925, the Foundation has granted
nearly $290 million in Fellowships to more than 17,000
individuals. Time and again, the Foundation’s choice of
Fellows has proved prescient: thousands of celebrated alumni
and scores of Nobel, Pulitzer, and other prizewinners grace
its rolls.
In a time of decreased funding for individuals in the arts,
humanities, and sciences, the Guggenheim Fellowship program
is all the more important. The continued and ever more
generous donations from friends, Trustees, former Fellows,
and other foundations have ensured that the John Simon
Guggenheim Memorial Foundation will be able to continue the
mission Senator and Mrs. Simon Guggenheim set for it: to
"add to the educational, literary, artistic, and scientific
power of this country, and also to provide for the cause of
better international understanding."
The full list of 2011 Fellows may be viewed online at
http://www.gf.org.
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