Six New Guggenheim Fellows in SAS
April 7, 2004
Six faculty members of the School of Arts and Sciences have received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. This represents the School’s largest number of recipients in one year since 1995.
The new fellows include professor of English Joan Dayan, associate professor of religious studies Talya Fishman, professor of history and sociology of science M. Susan Lindee, Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg Professor in the Humanities Peter Stallybrass, Ruth Meltzer Professor of Classical Hebrew Literature David Stern and Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History Margo Todd.
These fellowships, for which there were more than 3,200 applicants, are awarded annually for distinguished scholarly achievement and exceptional promise for future accomplishment. They include substantial stipends and are among North America’s most prestigious research awards. This year, 185 individuals from 87 institutions received fellowships. Of those 87 institutions, only five, including the School of Arts and Sciences, had six or more fellows.
“I was delighted to learn that so many of our faculty members received Guggenheim fellowships this year. These are extremely prestigious awards for which there is intense competition. That six of them went to SAS faculty is another very gratifying indicator of the caliber of scholarship in the School,” said SAS Dean Samuel H. Preston.
Fellowship recipient Joan Dayan teaches courses in Caribbean studies; 19th-century American, French, and English literary history; and the comparative legal and religious history of the Americas. The fellowship will support her research on a legal, cultural, and religious history of incarceration and slavery and their impact on identity.
Talya Fishman’s work focuses on Judaism in the medieval and early modern periods, with special interest in Jewish intellectual and cultural history. She is the Dalk and Rose Feith Fellow at Penn’s Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. She came to the University in 2001 and holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University. She is studying the inscription of Oral Torah and the transmission and formation of medieval Jewish culture.
M. Susan Lindee specializes in 20th-century biological and biomedical sciences, particularly radiation biology, human genetics, and genomics. She has been a member of the faculty since 1990. Her Ph.D. is from Cornell University. She is investigating the convergence of war, science, and the healing arts of medicine in the United States from 1914 to 2001.
Peter Stallybrass is co-director of the Penn Humanities Forum, director of the Center for the History of Material Texts, and a trustee of the English Institute at Harvard University. He taught for 12 years at the University of Sussex before coming to Penn in 1988. He is exploring the relationship between material forms of writing and methods of reading and literary composition in early modern England and America. He is also preparing exhibitions on “Benjamin Franklin and the Book” at the Library Company of Philadelphia and New York’s Grolier Club and on “Writing Technologies” at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C.
David Stern directs the Jewish Studies Program and is a scholar of classical Jewish literature and religion. He has been a member of the faculty since 1984, and he received his Ph.D. from Harvard. He is studying the ways in which the physical forms of the Talmud, the Rabbinic Bible, the Prayerbook, and the Passover Haggadah have shaped their meaning and significance within Jewish culture.
Margo Todd is an expert on early modern English and Scottish history and the culture of Reformed Protestantism in Britain and early America. She came to Penn last fall from Vanderbilt University and has a Ph.D. from Washington University. She is compiling an urban history of the royal burgh of Perth in 16th- and 17th-century Scotland.