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"It has to do with a breaking point in European culture generally," Walker says, "when worldly language and spiritual language separated around 1700 as ways to understand and describe experience."

Walker applied to the Guggenheim Foundation last year, suggesting his work in this area might be worthy of a research award. The foundation agreed, giving him one of the 179 Guggenheim Fellowships awarded for 1999.

A graduate of Bowdoin College and Harvard University, Walker has been teaching at Johns Hopkins since 1974. He has published a number of books on German history over the years and has won other fellowships including a Guggenheim in 1972, which he turned down because he had also won a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities that same year.

Prior to coming to Johns Hopkins, Walker taught at Cornell and Harvard universities. Walker's research will focus on two prominent German professors and intellectuals of the late 17th and early 18th centuries. Christian Thomasius was a professor of law and August Francke, was a religious leader and organizer. The two men were colleagues for decades and, at intervals, friends, rivals and enemies.

Walker plans on writing a sort of "dual biography involving the encounters of these people when they're friends, when they're enemies, what the issues are, how they cope with one another and so on. This gives me a way to do it, which is one of the things I had wondered about for a long time."

Guggenheim Fellows are selected on the basis of distinguished achievement in the past and exceptional promise for future accomplishment. Fellows include writers, painters, sculptors, photographers, film makers, choreographers, physical and biological scientists, social scientists and scholars in the humanities.