FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

April 7, 2005

GUGGENHEIM FELLOWSHIP AWARDS, 2005


Results of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation’s eighty-first annual United States and Canadian competition have been announced by Foundation president Edward Hirsch. The year 2005 Fellowship winners include 186 artists, scholars, and scientists selected from over 3,000 applicants for awards totaling $7,112,000. Decisions are based on recommendations from hundreds of expert advisors and are approved by the Foundation’s Board of Trustees, which includes seven members who are themselves past Fellows of the Foundation-Joel Conarroe, Joyce Carol Oates, Richard A. Rifkind, Charles A. Ryskamp, Wendy Wasserstein, 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 2005 Fellows is worth noting. They range from the 28 year-old New York composer, Yotam Haber, to the 76 year-old San Francisco writer, illustrator, and choreographer, Remy Charlip. Our 186 new Fellows range not only in age, but also in their interests as the following samples show: Blake Bailey’s biography of John Cheever; Michael J. Balick’s study of the ethnobotany of Micronesia; Leonard Barkan’s analogy of poetry and painting; Gregg Bloche’s study of medicine in the public sphere; Iain A. Boal’s study of the bicycle in world culture; and Patricia Burchat’s research involving dark matter in the universe.

Our new Fellows include the professor of cultural studies, Donald J. Cosentino from Los Angeles, who is studying a California priest/shaman and his Congo spirit; Martha Crenshaw of Middletown, Connecticut, who is studying the United States as a target of terrorism; the linguist James R. Dow from Ames, Iowa, researching the grammar of the Cymbrian language; the scholar, Mark Edmundson from Batesville, Virginia, who is researching the death of Sigmund Freud; Steven Englund, the writer from Paris, France, who is working on a biography of Charles de Gaulle; John Fleischman of Cincinnati, Ohio, a free-lance journalist writing a children’s book about genomes; Rhonda Garelick of New London, Connecticut, who is studying the theatrical work of Coco Chanel; Ronald M. Green of Dartmouth College, who is researching the ethical, religious, and literary perspectives on genetic enhancement; Eric Hongisto, the installation artist from Bozeman, Montana; Tryna Lyons of the United Arab Emirates, who is studying the clay festival-image tradition in Eastern India; Daniel Mendelsohn, a New York writer and critic, who is working on a translation of Cavafy’s “unfinished” poems; Jennifer Price, a writer from Venice, California, who is developing a field guide to Los Angeles; Donald J. Raleigh of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, who is researching Soviet baby boomers; Christopher Shinn, a New York playwright; Ned Sublette of New Orleans, who is studying the history of Cuban music; Thomas Sugrue of Philadelphia, who is researching the unfinished struggle for racial equality in the North; Margaret Tolbert of Boulder, Colorado, who is doing research related to the clouds on early Earth; and Santosh Srinivas Vempala, MIT, who is doing research on algorithmic convex geometry.

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 79 different fields from the natural sciences to the creative arts. The new Fellows include writers, 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 79 institutions being represented by one or more Fellows. It is also worth noting that 47 of the new Fellows have no academic or university affiliation.

Since 1925, according to Mr. Hirsch, the Foundation has granted almost $240 million in Fellowships to over 15,500 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 Advisor to the President, J. Paul Getty Trust, 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.

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 Laureates, Pulitzer and other prize winners appear on the roll of Fellows, which includes Ansel Adams, Aaron Copland, Langston Hughes, Henry Kissinger, Vladimir Nabokov, Isamu Noguchi, Linus Pauling, Paul Samuelson, Martha Graham, Philip Roth, Derek Walcott, James Watson, and Eudora Welty.

The full list of year 2005 Fellows is on the World Wide Web at http://www.gf.org.

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