FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

April 3, 2008
GUGGENHEIM FELLOWSHIP AWARDS, 2008

Edward Hirsch, the president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, announced today that in its 84th annual competition for the United States and Canada the Foundation has awarded 190 Fellowships to artists, scientists, and scholars, with awards totaling $8,200,000.  The successful candidates were chosen from a group of more than 2,600 applicants.

Guggenheim Fellows are appointed on the basis of stellar achievement and exceptional promise for continued accomplishment.  One of the hallmarks of the Guggenheim Fellowship program is the diversity of its Fellows, not only in their fields of endeavor but in their geographic location and ages.  This year’s Fellows continue that tradition.  Composer Mason Bates from Oakland, California, is thirty-one; New Jersey resident Harry Bernstein, whose career as a writer stretches back to the 1930s, is ninety-eight.  Another composer, Janet Maguire, will work at her residence in Venice, Italy, while Canadian Andrew Weaver will conduct his study of biogeochemical feedbacks on polar climate stability at the University of Victoria, British Columbia.  Denise L. Herzing plans to continue her twenty-three-year study of wild dolphins during her Fellowship term, while Mark I. Friedman will further explore the link between diet and obesity.

The creative arts are well represented by many new Fellows, including installation artist Anthony McCall and visual artist and printmaker Andrew Stein Raftery, photographers Michael P. Berman and Builder Levy, choreographers Art Bridgman and Myrna Packer, and filmmakers Anne Makepeace and Rodney Evans.  The Fellowship class of 2008 is also the richer for the inclusion of such poets as Michael Paul Burkard and Rae Armantrout, fiction writers Lan Samantha Chang and Thad Ziolkowski, biographer Michael F. Brenson, and two Pulitzer Prize winners: the writer Jonathan Weiner, who is exploring the connection between science and art, and Margo Jefferson, who is studying racial composition and improvisation.

In all, seventy-five disciplines and eighty-one different academic institutions are represented by this year’s Fellows.  Fifty-six Fellows are unaffiliated or hold only adjunct or part-time positions at universities.  Supplemental support for these unaffiliated Fellows is provided by the Leon Levy Foundation. 

According to President Hirsch, since its establishment in 1925 the Foundation has granted more than $265 million in Fellowships to almost 16,500 individuals.  Scores of Nobel, Pulitzer, and other prize winners grace the roll of Fellows, including Ansel Adams, W. H. Auden, Aaron Copland, Martha Graham, Langston Hughes, Henry Kissinger, Vladimir Nabokov, Isamu Noguchi, Linus Pauling, Philip Roth, Paul Samuelson, Wendy Wasserstein, Derek Walcott, James Watson, and Eudora Welty.

In a time of decreased funding for individuals in the arts, humanities, and sciences, the Guggenheim Fellowship program has assumed a greatly increased importance.  Thanks to the continued and ever more generous donations of friends and former Fellows, the Foundation has been able to increase each year both the number of awards and the average amount of its grants.

This year, the Foundation was also able to offer for the first time two Fellowships in Constitutional Studies because of a gift from the Dorothy Tapper Goldman Foundation.  Richard Primus, a professor of law at the University of Michigan, and Randy E. Barnett, Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Legal Theory at Georgetown University Law Center, are the inaugural Fellows in this new field.  The Foundation is also granting three Fellowships in the new field of Translation, to Ann Goldstein and Edith Grossman, who are unaffiliated, and to Val Vinokur, who is an assistant professor of comparative literature at the New School’s Eugene Lang College.

The Foundation is deeply indebted once again to its scores of expert advisers and its Committee of Selection, both of which are composed exclusively of former Fellows, and to its Board of Trustees, six of whose members are also Guggenheim alumni.

The full list of 2008 Fellows may be viewed at http://www.gf.org.

home page