FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

April 6, 2006

GUGGENHEIM FELLOWSHIP AWARDS, 2006


Results of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation’s eighty-second annual United States and Canadian competition have been announced by Foundation president Edward Hirsch. The year 2006 Fellowship winners include 187 artists, scholars, and scientists selected from almost 3,000 applicants for awards totaling $7,500,000. Decisions are based on recommendations from hundreds of expert advisors and are approved by the Foundation’s Board of Trustees, which includes six members who are themselves past Fellows of the Foundation – Joel Conarroe, Joyce Carol Oates, Richard A. Rifkind, Charles A. Ryskamp, Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, and Edward Hirsch.

Guggenheim Fellows are appointed on the basis of distinguished achievement in the past and exceptional promise for future accomplishment. The diversity of the 2006 Fellows is worth noting.  They range from the 30-year-old Patrick Radden Keefe of New York, who is researching networks of cross-border criminal and terrorist organizations, and the 29-year-old Alison P. Galvani of Yale University, who is conducting research on the public perception of influenza vaccination policies, to the 81-year-old Kansas City painter, Wilbur Niewald.  The 187 new Fellows range not only in age but also in their interests, as the following samples show:  Judy J. Blunt’s essays on the legend of the strong Western woman; Paul M. Cobb’s work on Usama ibn Munqidh’s memoirs and the Muslims in the age of the Crusades; Martha Feldman’s research on the castrato as myth; Barbara Fuchs’ research on “Moorish” culture and the conflictive construction of Spain; Ruth Ellen Gruber’s work on imaginary Wild Wests in contemporary Europe; Allan Gurganus’ work on a new novel; and Constance Valance Hill’s cultural history of tap dancing in America since 1900.

Our new Fellows also include Carla Kaplan, a professor of English and gender studies from Los Angeles, who is doing scholarly research on the white women of the Harlem Renaissance; the biologist Schuyler S. Korban of Urbana, Illinois, who is studying plant-based vaccines; the ecologist Jianguo Liu of Michigan State University, who is researching people, pandas, and policies; Donald S. Lopez, Jr., a professor from the University of Michigan, who is compiling a short history of the Buddha; Harvard University’s L. Mahadevan, who is researching the integrative pathophysiology of sickle-cell disease; Joseph Mazur, a professor from Marlboro College, who is writing a memoir about his life in mathematics; the free-lance writer, Laurence Pringle, who is working on children’s books about evolution; John V. Robinson, a California English instructor, who is researching the folklore of the high-steel ironworkers; the author Carlo Rotella of Boston College, who is researching the signifying place of music in human lives; University of Oregon’s Stephen J. Shoemaker, who is conducting scholarly research on the end of Muhammad’s life in Christian and early Islamic sources; Ronald Schuchard of Emory University, who is working on a complete edition of T. S. Eliot’s prose; and Leon Wieseltier of Washington, D.C., who is translating the unpublished writings of Yehuda Amichai.

What distinguishes the Guggenheim Fellowship program from all others is the wide range in interest, age, geography, and institution of those it selects as it considers applications in 78 different fields, from the natural sciences to the creative arts.  The new Fellows include writers, playwrights, painters, sculptors, photographers, film makers, choreographers, physical and biological scientists, social scientists, and scholars in the humanities.  Many of these individuals hold appointments in colleges and universities with 100 institutions being represented by one or more Fellows.  It is also worth noting that some four dozen of the new Fellows have no affiliation with academic institutions or hold only adjunct positions in them.

Since 1925, according to Mr. Hirsch, the Foundation has granted over $247 million in Fellowships to just over 16,000 individuals.  The Foundation’s scores of advisory panels make recommendations to the Committee of Selection, whose members this year are Roger D. Abrahams, Hum Rosen Professor Emeritus of Folklore and Folklife, University of Pennsylvania; John I. Brauman, J. G. Jackson - C. J. Wood Professor of Chemistry,  Stanford University; Lynn A. Hunt, Eugen Weber Professor of Modern European History, University of California, Los Angeles; Jack Miles, Senior Fellow, Pacific Council on International Policy, Los Angeles; Peter H. Raven, Director, Missouri Botanical Garden and Engelmann Professor of Botany, Washington University; and committee chair Neil J. Smelser, former Director, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, California.

In a time of decreased funding for individuals in the arts, humanities, and sciences, the Guggenheim Fellowship program has assumed a greatly increased importance, and the Foundation is successfully raising funds to enable the appointment of a larger number of Fellows each year.  Scores of Nobel, Pulitzer, and other prize winners appear on the roll of Fellows, which includes Ansel Adams, 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.

The full list of year 2006 Fellows is on the World Wide Web at http://www.gf.org.

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