Guggenheim Announces 2009 Fellowship Awards for the United States and Canada

April 8, 2009 — Edward Hirsch, the president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, announced today that in its eighty-fifth annual competition for the United States and Canada the Foundation has awarded 180 Fellowships to artists, scientists, and scholars. The successful candidates were chosen from a group of almost 3,000 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. The ages of this year's Fellows range from twenty-nine to seventy; their residences span the world, from Waipahu, Hawaii, to New York City and from Toronto to Glasgow; and their Fellowship projects will carry them to every continent. For example, Deborah Lawrence will be studying the sustainability of shifting cultivation in Chiang Mai, Thailand, while Janet M. Conrad will be working on a new detector for large liquid argon experiments at MIT and Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois; Saskia Hamilton will be in the Netherlands, completing poems for her new collection; composer Erin Gee will work in Graz, Austria; and Kathryn Linn Geurts will be in Ghana, studying the ethnography of disability in urban Africa. Chris Abani's research for his novel requires him to travel from his home in Los Angeles to South Africa and the islands of South Georgia; and Julia Loktev will be in the country of Georgia working on her fiction feature film. L. Scott Mills will be applying his ecological knowledge to the conservation of biodiversity in the Kingdom of Bhutan, while Yasuko Yokoshi will be working on her latest choreographic piece in New York, Tokyo, Tallahassee, and Alberta, Canada.

In all, sixty-two disciplines and sixty-eight 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 $273 million in Fellowships to nearly 16,700 individuals. Scores of Nobel, Pulitzer, and other prizewinners 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 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."

Thanks to continued support from The Dorothy Tapper Goldman Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation was again able to offer a Fellowship in Constitutional Studies, a field inaugurated last year: Risa L. Goluboff, a professor of law and history at the University of Virginia Law School, will use her Guggenheim Fellowship to conduct research on the vagrancy laws of the 1960s. In the field of Translation, which was also offered for the first time last year, two Fellowships were awarded: Carl W. Ernst, the William R. Kenan, Jr., Distinguished Professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, will be preparing a translation and study of the poetry of al-Hallaj; and Howard C. Goldblatt, interim director of the University of Notre Dame's Center for Asian Studies, will be translating Mo Yan's Tanxiang Xing. Guggenheim Fellowship Awards, 2009

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.