Six faculty members in the Krieger School of Arts and
Sciences are among the 180 artists,
scholars and scientists who have been named 2009 Guggenheim
Fellows by the John Simon Guggenheim
Memorial Foundation. Chosen from nearly 3,000 applicants
from the United States and Canada, the
fellows were appointed on the basis of distinguished
achievement and exceptional promise for future
accomplishment. The grant period is the 2009-2010 academic
year.
The new fellows are Amanda Anderson and Richard
Halpern, both in the
Department of English; Veena Das, in
Anthropology;
Barbara Landau, in
Cognitive Science; Theodore Lewis, in Near Eastern
Studies; and Robert Moffitt, in Economics.
"The Guggenheim is one of the most prestigious
fellowships awarded in American academia,
especially in the humanities and social sciences," said
David A. Bell, the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in
the Humanities and
dean of the school's faculty.
"This year the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences,
which has fewer than 300 tenured and
tenure-track faculty members, won as many Guggenheims as
all but one other university in the United
States, including five awards in the humanities and social
sciences," Bell said. "This is a truly
extraordinary achievement, which testifies to the
exceptionally high quality of our faculty, to the
vitality of the intellectual life on our campus and to
Johns Hopkins' leading role in the entire spectrum
of American academic research."
The Guggenheim Fellowship recognizes scholars of
various ages and interests. The foundation
considers applicants in a wide variety of fields, from the
natural sciences to the creative arts,
including physical and biological scientists, social
scientists, scholars in the humanities, writers,
painters, sculptors, photographers, filmmakers and
choreographers. Since its establishment in 1925,
the foundation has granted more than $273 million to nearly
16,700 people. The foundation is not
releasing the amount of the grants this year, but the
average last year was $43,200. Because the
purpose of the program is to help provide fellows with
blocks of time in which they can work with as
much creative freedom as possible, grants are made freely
with no special conditions attached to
them, and fellows may spend their grant funds in any manner
they deem necessary for their work.
Amanda Anderson is the Caroline Donovan Professor of
English Literature and chair of the
department. She specializes in critical theory and
19th-century British literature and culture. "My
project reconsiders the relation between liberal aesthetics
and philosophical liberalism, focusing on
the way that a dialectic of skepticism and hope
characterizes both traditions," Anderson said. "I will
spend the grant period in Baltimore, researching and
writing."
Veena Das is the Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of
Anthropology and chair of the department.
She has worked intensively on questions of violence, on the
relation between philosophy and
anthropology, and on urban health. "My project is entitled
'Entangled Identities: Muslims and Hindus in
Urban India,' in which I will be engaged in analyzing the
production and circulation of various kinds of
texts in Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi and Bengali in low-income
neighborhoods in Delhi," Das said. "Departing
from the usual tropes of syncretism or hybridity, I ask how
political theologies are evolving within
specific local ecologies and what possibilities these might
hold for what I call 'an agonistic belonging to
a plural society.' The Guggenheim Fellowship will enable me
to complete writing this book. I will be in
Delhi, Paris and Baltimore for the duration of the
fellowship."
Richard Halpern is the Sir William Osler Professor of
English and director of undergraduate
studies for the department. His research interests include
Renaissance literature, Shakespeare,
science and literature, and critical theory. "My project,
titled 'Eclipse of Action: Tragedy and Political
Economy,' examines the challenges for stage tragedy posed
by the rise of a capitalist economy and its
values," Halpern said. He will spend the Guggenheim year
researching and writing in New York City.
Barbara Landau is the Dick and Lydia Todd Professor
and chair of the Department of Cognitive
Science. Her work focuses on language learning, spatial
representation and the relationships between
these foundational systems of human knowledge. "The
fellowship will allow me to work full-time during
my sabbatical this coming year on a book that illuminates
the nature of spatial knowledge in people
with an unusual genetic deficit that results in severely
impaired understanding of space," Landau said.
The book, she said, will be titled 'Gene, Brain, Mind and
Development: The Puzzle of Williams
Syndrome' and is under contract with Oxford University
Press. "I'll be spending most of the year here
at Johns Hopkins but will also be traveling a bit to work
with colleagues who specialize in the nature of
human spatial knowledge," she said.
Theodore Lewis is the Blum-Iwry Professor and chair of
the Department of Near Eastern
Studies. He is a Semitist, a biblical scholar and a
historian of religion specializing in the religions of
ancient Israel and Syria in the Late Bronze and Iron ages.
In addition to the texts of the Hebrew
Bible (the Old Testament), he works with alphabetic
cuneiform texts from the ancient Syrian city of
Ugarit. "During next year, I will be researching and
writing a volume on Ancient Israelite Religion for
the Yale Anchor Bible Reference Library series," Lewis
said. "For the most part, I will be staying in
Baltimore locked away in my study so that I can write,
write, write."
Robert Moffitt is the Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of
Economics. His areas of specialization
are labor economics, econometrics, public economics and
population economics. He also holds a joint
appointment in the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public
Health. Information about how Moffitt
will use his fellowship was not available at press time.
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